


Vigilante's Run - Continuation

by STMPD



Category: Bubblegum Crisis
Genre: Action/Adventure, Cyberpunk, Explosions, Hyperviolence, Lasers, OC's - Freeform, Railguns, Robots, Superheroes, Yakuza
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-05-25 02:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14966933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/STMPD/pseuds/STMPD
Summary: There's a new hardsuited vigilante in Megatokyo, and he's not content to just kill Boomers - his target is the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza, the city's biggest crime syndicate, and he'll do whatever it takes to take them down. Already, he's got over two hundred dead gangsters to his name, and as the fragile balance of power that once characterized Megatokyo's underworld is torn apart by other syndicates eager for a bit of Sleeping Dragon turf, that body count is set to rise.The Knight Sabers find themselves both outclassed and outgunned, in a world where robots and cybernetics haven't changed the tribal dynamics of human brutality. Will they stop Nemesis? Will they help him? Or, as the city descends into chaos, will their work not even matter?One thing's for certain - it's going to be a wild ride to find out.





	1. Chapter 20.5: Katherine Madigan, Exposition Fiend

**Author's Note:**

> The Bubblegum Crisis Franchise is currently the property of the AIC Rights Holding Company - I own none of the material from the original series, but am using the material in a not-for-profit manner, so it's a-okay to steal their shit. If you seriously think otherwise, you probably wouldn't pass a Voight-Kampff test and also probably are the kind of person who maims small animals for fun.
> 
> Vigilante's Run is the brainchild of Craig A. Reed Jr., who is now a bona fide published writer. I'm just continuing something I thought was worth continuing - but fear not! Mr. Reed has given me permission to keep this continuation up.
> 
> Now, sit back, relax. Grab a drink. Read about dudes blowing robots up and shit.

GENOM tower  
February 11, 2036  
10:05 am  
Katherine Madigan rode the lift up to Chairman Quincy’s office clinging to her tablet the way a drowning sailor would cling to a liferaft, glaring at its contents, flipping back and forth between pages. Ever since the attack by Largo on the Chairman, she’d only gone up there to report in person on Omicron-level security issues, the sort of things which would hinder the long term goals of the company, like the Knight Sabers, or the time GENOM’s attempted theft of the Russian smallpox cultures had been counterhijacked by a Maersk Shipping berserker platoon, leaving one of the deadliest diseases in human history in the hands of a bunch of drug-addled Swedish boomeroid sailors - well, that was the one case which came most immediately to mind. Today, though, she’d come at her own behest, even though the security issue of the day was Yesod-level at most.

The elevator reached the top, and the doors slid open. Quincy was at his desk as always, eyes fixed on Madigan from across the room.

She opened before he could cut in with some snarky comment. “I have the report on the Drayson Arms incident right here, sir. Do you require an oral review, or-”

“Of course,” Chairman Quincy said with a voice that rumbled like an old diesel engine. “I assume you’ve gathered sufficient contextual data to justify a review outside of the report, so to speak?”

“Of course, sir. I would not trouble you otherwise.”

“Well then,” he said, shrugging his shoulders with a ripple of spider-silk suit. “Begin.”

So she did.  
____________________________________________________________________  
“Yesterday, at approximately a quarter to four in the morning, the hardsuit-wearing vigilante known as Nemesis announced his presence in Tokyo by assaulting a crew of Sleeping Dragon Yakuza unloading illegal weaponry from the cargo ship Akagi Maru, at Pier 234. As he previously did in America, he killed almost the entire crew and their security force, even going so far as to plant landmines on a nearby road to eliminate reinforcements, and mining the Akagi Maru, but warning them of detonation in advance. He left one man alive, so as to send a message: namely, that Oyabun Shikichi Sato’s operations, the largest crime syndicate in Megatokyo, was no longer safe.”

“Because landmines and sinking an entire cargo ship wasn’t a message enough?”

“Nemesis used remote missiles and a minigun loaded with Teflon-tipped hydroshock rounds as weapons, according to ADP reports. I don’t think subtlety was ever on his mind, sir.”

“It never has, has it? Especially when one considers what he’s done to organized crime groups across the Pacific. Stealing an Apache-4 to take out an entire armed convoy of Russian Mafia? One can’t help but admire the man.”

“I agree, sir. Shall I continue?”  
Quincy shrugged. “Of course. We haven’t even gotten to the good part, have we?”

“No, sir. The good part comes from last night.”

“Beginning around nine-thirty, Nemesis conducted a series of strikes on illegal businesses owned by the Sleeping Dragon. There were, as always, no civilian casualties, but a near total massacre of opposing forces. This culminated in a strike on the Fu-Shui Nightclub, where he entered from the roof and progressively eliminated two floors of drug labs and numerous Yakuza forces - apparently he acquired a mounted Gerlitch anti-Boomer rifle they had tried to use to eliminate him and used it on unarmored targets.”

“This had, however, been anticipated by Sato, which was why he called in a twelve-man team of military-grade K-11 Jaeger powersuit specialists to corral and eliminate Nemesis. But their target lead them over to the abandoned Drayson Arms apartment complex as an ADP perimeter was rapidly being established, although this did not prevent the Knight Sabers from attempting to surveil the area and being forced to make an emergency landing.

“What happened next is not quite clear, but as best as ADP reports and our own sources can tell, Nemesis had a nearby vehicle in place which he used to swap into a more powerful hardsuit. The vehicle also contained a phosphorus mortar launcher. Needless to say, between the mortars, the severe weather, and his anti-armor heavy weaponry, the Jaegers were promptly eliminated; the Sabers appear to have escaped as well despite damage to their skycarrier.”

“Then, the OCU lost track of four persons who are believed to be major players in the criminal underworld: Jimmy Chee of the Triads, Adrik Smirnovski of the Russian Mafia, Willie Chung as a representative of several ethnic sub-mafias, and Tomasuki Iwasaki of the Red Willow Yakuza. Five hours later, Chee and Iwasaki were spotted exiting the Golden Stallion, owned by Chung. The ADP believe the four groups have formed a tentative alliance to take down Sato for good. My own sources have given me no reason to deny this.”

“So in sum: We have one heavily armed Yakuza syndicate - I was able to find records of them purchasing tank-grade Bu-12b’s - one heavily armed vigilante with few compunctions, a fragile alliance of criminals willing to bring their own weapons to bear, and probably the Knight Sabers somewhere in between. Projections indicate that an all-out gang war would cause approximately ten trillion yen in damage if it was to drag on for more than two weeks, but only a billion yen if hostilities were terminated within less than a week.”

“It would, of course, not be our money paying for reconstruction; the MegaTokyo Construction Project charter has the Japanese government act as insurance for any major damage. But suffice to say urban warfare in our Technologically Integrated City would not do well for publicity.”  
____________________________________________________________________  
“Well,” Quincy said at last, “I think we should be able to brush this off as an illegal usage of legal products. With so much publicity from Nemesis arriving, at least compared to the final incident regarding Gulf and Bradley, it wouldn’t do for us to deploy our own force or to remotely disable them via the OMS.”

Madigan said nothing, fiddled wordlessly with her tablet. She had, Quincy noted, her classic ‘I-have-a-better-idea-than-the-boss-but-I-can’t-work-up-the-courage-to-openly-defy-his-decisions-as-an-Irishwoman-in-an-old-style-zaibatsu’ look. On her beautiful features, that little pout and scrunched brow was truly photo-worthy.

“You have anything else to report, Miss Madigan?”

She let out a breath, then inhaled inaudibly. “I do, sir. I am firmly of the opinion that this instability in the city’s organized crime structures is an opportunity to further shore up our position within Megatokyo. I hope you would be so kind as to take my considerations into account, sir.”

Quincy laughed. “Now now now, Miss Madigan. Are you implying that we do not have sufficient control over choice elements within the city which is our home base? Concern over, say, Montreal or Mexico City I could understand, but do you mean to tell me that our ties to every single Japanese and UN agency in this nation are not enough?”

Her eyes narrowed. “With all due respect, sir, we have allowed dissident elements to flourish in this city for far too long precisely because we have focused only on gaining market and political control.” Her voice began to rise, from her former calm tone to an excited one. “We’re a generation behind Chang, Tata-Brahmin, or any other megacorp you might care to name in terms of universally implemented social and memetic coercion methods, and it’s this power vacuum which has allowed the Knight Sabers to turn public opinion against us.”

Quincy opened his mouth, only for Madigan to cut him off with a single raised finger. “Please let me finish, sir. You might think that in the long run public opinion is meaningless for our ultimate goals, but it is still a threat to us now! We may be able to dodge the bullet if this gang war is brief, but if Megatokyo burns again, the Sabers will capitalize on this, they will begin to engineer a social movement against our ideal status quo, and if Megatokyo is declared an unsafe place however we try to silence it, we will not be dealing with cooperative urban authorities when we wish to expand into new areas! We must create a counterrevolutionary meme-chain now!”

“Of course,” Quincy said. He grinned, revealing a full mouth of light grey teeth. “I’m so glad you caught on. Mason would have taken twice as long to figure the angles out.”

Madigan practically sprang forward. “I don’t like being lead on, sir. Especially over matters so sensitive.”

“Of course you don’t, but I doubt I’ll need to do it in the future. Now, final test: what exactly is your plan?”

“We need fear,” Madigan half-shouted. She began to pace in front of Quincy’s desk. “The criminal element has always been accepted, if not idolized, in Megatokyo, especially when they go against GENOM and other figures of authority- Skeeter Karns is an excellent case. However, outside of the Kanto prefecture, trust in the police and distrust of criminals is still highly prevalent - Japan is, after all, a highly communal society. We know, then, that it is possible to engineer such an obedient populace, we simply must galvanize the public into accepting us and our government in that way.”

“Obvious. Go on.”

“We need fabricated social insecurity engineering a desire for the police to get truly ‘tough on crime’. Thus, we need a binary between a singular sinister criminal organization, a synthetic syndicate if you will pardon my alliteration, and the N-Police and ADP. Ideally, both organizations will be under our control, allowing us to stage fear-inducing incidents within the city as necessary.”

“And how does this tie back to Nemesis and his private war?”

“Nemesis and the Sabers are useless; they and the ADP can’t hope to take on all five syndicates at once and come out intact. However, we might be able to expedite the gang war in our favor by patronizing a certain syndicate, perhaps one of the smaller ones, with discreet shipments of combat Boomers. Then we’ve essentially established one gang to rule the criminals of the city, maybe even eliminating Skeeter Karns and his allies; that’s step one.”

“The eliminating Karns thing sounds a bit difficult, but given sufficient force…”

“From there, we play up the incompetence of the current ADP and bring up proposals for heavy reform or privatization. We use the OMS once or twice to allow ADP a handful of victories against Sato’s Boomers, allowing choice squadrons choice glory. Then, we get City Hall to expunge all anti-GENOM elements within the police department - especially those two bastard Sargeants - and install private contractors, veterans, essentially officers more inclined to our particularly aggressive type of operation. We retain the human element, knowing that having Boomers fight Boomers will require public support we currently lack, but offer as much heavy equipment as we can at break-even prices. Then we have a criminal element we can send out to play when we want, and an ADP which will beat them into the dirt, ideally incurring heavy civilian casualties - but there will be a distinct enemy in the form of our criminal syndicate which we can control. Thus, they can say that these massive urban battles are for a cause people will ultimately accept, thereby obliterating public interest regarding rampant Boomers and the Sabers in favor of our puppet boys in blue!”

By that point, Madigan had walked the length of Quincy’s desk about a dozen times, and had just barely begun to perspire. She whipped around to face her boss once again. “Sir.”

“It’s a bit of a high-stakes gamble you want to make, Miss Madigan,” Quincy drawled. “You’re assuming you can make the ADP loose and win as you please, you’re assuming that a staff turnover won’t make martyrs out of the more famous officers, and you’re assuming - most importantly - that enough of the public will swing the way you want them to with minimal effort. I don’t know if I can condone all of that.”

Had he said it to any other GENOM executive, Quincy’s note of disapproval would have driven half of them to gibbering despair and caused the other half to commit hara-kiri, his word was worth so much to them. Madigan just looked annoyed. “Does that mean you don’t approve, sir?”

“It only means that while I’d gladly sign off on such a project, I can’t also approve giving you sole control over it. I want to see the opening moves of this conflict - the first big battle - for myself before I decide to prolong it or end it. We’ll use the OMS for this, primarily. It needs a field test and I don’t want any new Boomers being traced back to us.”

Well, thought Madigan, that was as close to an outright endorsement from Quincy as she was going to get. All the bitchy execs who kept calling her “Harley Quincy” and “Slut of the Irish” could take this and stick it up their assholes. “Anything else?”

“The usual. Put up a list of recommended external personnel for your new ADP and make a compelling case for a given syndicate, get it cleared by the security committee - yes, I know you outrank them, but I’m not giving you sole control over this - and you’ll have my blessing to toy with the Sleeping Dragons as much as you like.”

“Excellent. If you’ll excuse me, sir.” And with that she left, the only sign of her passing the echo of her heels on the tiled floor.

And Chairman Quincy, the most powerful man in the world, laughed, for he was happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I brought an obscure fanfiction from a dead fandom back from the Geocities pit in which it had long rested, and put it on AO3, and now I’m trying to finish what Reed started 15 years ago despite the fact that no one appreciates Bubblegum Crisis for anything more than nostalgia purposes.
> 
> Woo. Go me.
> 
> In the meantime, please leave comments, even if they're primarily criticizing how selfish I am by stealing someone else's fanfic. Anything helps my fragile little ego at this point, folks.


	2. Chapter 21: Answers at last

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Priss talks with her youthful ward, while the AD Police do some digging into Nemesis's past.

District 7  
February 11, 2036  
9:31 am

Sho’s room had barely been altered from the starter kit of white-paint-cinderblock-featureless-cot-with-no-blanket-plastic-dresser-carbon-fiber-rug in all the years Priss had known the kid. The first few years, he didn’t play with toys while the other boys had fought for any Gundam figure they could lay their hands on. When the other boys got into gamesofts and spent hours playing FFXXV, he sat in his room and read the same book fifteen times over. And now he was almost fourteen, and he’d only just started thinking about girls. There was one Priss and The Replicants poster directly opposite his bed, and she’d only managed to have him put it up after getting him to admit that yes, he was a fan, so of course he should act like one.

  
_Four years. Four fucking years since everything happened._

It would have hurt less if it had been to get at her, if they’d crushed Kaori-chan for explicit ‘refrigerating’ purposes. The sheer cliche would have made it more bearable, for one, easy to understand, and it would have been something unique to that family, for another. But no: Sho was just another kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so revenge was useless, guilt a luxury.

Priss knocked on his open door, and he looked up. He was sitting on his bed reading something. She slipped in, leaving Harohata to her business, and sat on the bed right next to the boy.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s up.”

“Hi, oneesan,” he said, looking up. “Not much, I guess.”

“Aw, c’mon, you got a new book, right? That’s gotta count for something. Big one, too… is that No Longer Human?”

“Uh-huh.”

She knew that Sho was this quiet even when she left, the staff had told her so, but was this predestined? Would he have grown up this way, normally? Or had PTSD or another one of Sylia’s acronymical disorders spirited away the part of his brain that made someone excited, willing to talk?

Because conversations with him were always like this: fumble around for the thing that Sho had been thinking about lately, snag on it, then watch as his verbal faucet was yanked to open, so to speak. Trust was what mattered, or so went her theory. Sho trusted her enough to talk, but not to open. Sho didn’t trust anyone enough to do that.

“Who’s that by again?”

“Osamu Dazai.”

“Huh.” She brought her hand to her chin in an imitation of deep thought. “Yeah, I remember him. He killed himself, right? Kinda autobiographical, that.”

“No. He killed himself way after he wrote the book.”

“Oh.”

Silence again. “You know what would be funny? If they had Osamu Tezuka and Osamu Dazai do something together. Like, Astro Boy considers suicide or something, maybe-”

“Oneesan.”

“Right, sorry.” She thought that would be the end of it, but then Sho spoke again:

“Oneesan, are you okay?”

Priss’s eyes went wide for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. “W-what do you mean? Of course I’m fine. Good as I’ll ever be.”

“Oh.” Sho put his book down and swung his legs down over the edge of the bed. “Herohata says that there will be a gang war soon. I thought that’d hurt you really bad.”

“What? Do you really think your oneesan is a gangster?” She laughed. “Do I walk around with a heavy Kansai accent wearing suits two sizes too big?”

“Yokosawa says you used to be one, and that you have a ‘degenerate criminal mentality’. Is that true?”

“Well,” she said, sighing, “I’m not a gangster, and Yokosawa hated me deeply. so don’t worry about me kidnapping you or whatever.”

“But you ran away from the home, right?”

“I guess. Things were way worse back in the day, and I never got along well with the other kids, so it was different. You’re not gonna run away, though, are you?”

“Nope. No place to go, anyway.”

“That’s good. It’s nice to know my lil’ Sho-kun’s being responsible.”

“But are you gonna be okay? I mean, everyone’s been talking about this whole gang war thing, ever since Nemesis-”

She cut him off. “Nemesis is just another Knight Saber. He wants to help people, so sooner or later he’s going to realize that it’s for the best if he leaves town, and then there won’t be a war.”

“Are you sure?”

“C’mon, Sho. If you were Nemesis, what would you do?”

“I’d want to help people, not get people killed, but he probably thinks he is helping people, right? Because they’re criminals, so if he kills them he saves innocent lives.”

“Fair point.” She kicked her legs back and forth. “With the Yakuza it’s always so hard to tell. Guess he must be from out of town.”

“But that won’t stop the gangs fighting!” Sho cried. “It’s one of those foot-in-the-door things we learned about at school where once you start something you can’t stop. And what if one of them attacks us? What happens then?”

Priss cradled her head in her hands. Sho didn’t know that she’d come face to face with the motherfucker just a few hours ago, and she was going to keep it that way. Very few things could seriously rattle her the way his stint with the Gerlitch had, and now on top of that she had to look forward to Megatokyo’s slums burning as every criminal syndicate in the city called in their out-of-town private armies? And Mister Skullface couldn’t care less? It’d been bugging her ever since she’d woken up that morning, and she needed to shake it off, but Sho wasn’t going to shake it off, and she couldn’t blame him…

“Oneesan?”

“I don’t know, Sho. I wish I did.”

“Sorry. Seriously, did something happen?”

She could tell him the edited version of the story, the one with a Knight Saber-shaped hole in it, but what would be the point? It wouldn’t make him feel safer. It wouldn’t get anything off her chest.

“Well, no. Truth is, pretty much everyone’s scared, even the grownups.”

“I’m thirteen, oneesan, I know that grownups get scared.”

“Not what I meant. There’s - adults, who just get older, and grownups, who get wiser. Now, all the adults are scared, but the ones who really grew up? They’re even more scared, because - because they know the gloves are off. I guess you saw it in the papers, but even the most grownup of grownups like Sato don’t take having nearly three hundred of their people killed in cold blood well. And Nemesis didn’t stop the last couple of times in America, so he won’t stop now, and neither will Sato. So - yeah.”

“Should I worry?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess. The thing about grownups is that they always will have something to worry about, whether they want to or not, because they’re grown up, so everything is, is their problem. They even worry when they can’t do anything about it. But you - well, you can worry, but Sho-” here she reached out to him, put a hand on his shoulder, tried to be the best big sister she could-

“Yeah.”

“Don’t be afraid.”  
____________________________________________________________________  
ADP Headquarters  
February 11, 2036  
9:43 am

 

“Operation Templar? Doesn’t ring a bell.”

So said former Lieutenant Jeff ‘Jeffy’ Holland, once a decorated Marine, now running a psychotrauma clinic for the few hundred vets of the world’s militaries in Megatokyo.

“You sure?” Daley said. “I think it was an Army op stationed in South America, that help any?”

He could practically hear Holland shrug over the phone. “I don’t actually get a lot of landlubbers in the clinic. There’s no regular detachment in Japan - Okinawa’s a naval base, that’s all squids, and USSD is - well - it’s USSD. So there just ain’t enough washed-up army boys with a support network to make them not turn to drugs n’chrome.”

“Well, shit. Thanks for your time anyway.”

“No problem, Wong. Where’re you gonna check, anyhow? Got American buddies?”

“Let’s just say I know a guy.”

9:45 am

“Operation Templar… templar templar templar… what breed of op?”

Sergeant Carmen Lobelia was a public-facing officer stationed at the USSD base outside of Megatokyo. She’d met Daley during the Killer Doll scandal, she’d barely begun to hit on him before he crushed her nascent dreams, and they were now people who would periodically recognize one another at parties, or crime scenes.

“Army. SpecFor. South America.”

“And you’re sure it’s not public knowledge? Plenty of stuff gets leaked all the time, you know. Paperclip, Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm, Blue Lampoon, things like that.”

“Positive. I just checked the Rangers’ veterans website, and they don’t even list cookouts without an account.”

“Ahhhh, ohkayyy. Yeah, USSD prefers to run their ops alone, but we’ve coordinated once or twice. I can send you a couple of files at my clearance, but I don’t think you’ll get much. If they didn’t have mesospheric aerial support, we’ve got nothing.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Daley hung up. He hadn’t expected much, but it was always good to confirm little details like this. No navy, no spacers, just Army Rangers in the pits of South America, doing… what exactly? He barely remembered where he’d heard it from, remembered a scandal, but it was a headline in some paper years ago at most, just another thing the Americans did that the Japanese government wanted no part of.

Let them have their endless proxy wars against Brazil and China and Iran, they figured. GENOM could sell to all sides in that case while relying on US muscle to protect it in case the Chinese or Koreans got too antsy. Daley had accepted this logic for the most part. Now, he wished he hadn’t.

10:05 am

“Wong, I would if I could, but Operation Templar is currently considered a Level-5 Security Asset, which means that under no circumstances are we to even admit that it exists to civvies. I get to tell you it happened because you’re a cop, but-”

“It was under your jurisdiction, right? Didn’t you used to do some big moving and shaking in SOUMERCOM?”

“Can’t tell you.”

Captain Dave Harp had, in fact, been an Asset Coordinator within the South American Command of the Army, which meant he had the good fortune of coordinating supply airlifts to soldiers stranded in trackless Venezuelan jungles in such a manner that they wouldn’t get shot out of the sky by loyalist forces. After Caracas was secured by the Colombians, he got himself transferred to a cushy post in Megatokyo, occasionally disturbed from his tobacco-fueled self-immolation by shifting priorities in the Polar War. His was the domain of the armchair tactician, and as such if he could help allied forces like the ADP out, he would.  
That he was playing the ‘we-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny’ game with Daley didn’t bode well, suffice to say.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You know, but you’re not telling me.”

“I know of it, Wong, and everything I know tells me no sane officer would be telling you anything about Operation Templar. Just stay out of this one, okay? In any case-”

Daley hung up before Harp could ask him why he was calling. After all, he’d gotten the info by having a college-age girl hack into one of the most heavily protected databases on the planet - it just wouldn’t do to tell the owners of said database that.  
Okay, but no sane officer would tell him anything. In that case, it was probably time to start checking the insane cases. Three more calls, at most, and then he’d leave this for tomorrow and get to Anderson’s warrants.

10:18 am

“Operation Templar, huh?”

Philip Bourne was a drill instructor at a camp in Panama known among Army grunts as “The Gauntlet”, where greenhorns learned rough terrain maneuvers hacking their way through the Central American jungle. He knew Daley by a friend-of-a-friend relationship, where Leon’s cousin on his mother’s side had helped cover Bourne’s rear from a dishonorable discharge involving the packing of human feces around the decoy landmines on Training Course #8.

“No, I knew, like, one guy who was in it, a pretty elite Ranger even though he was a petty officer. He got killed in the San Rafael arcology bombings, though - don’t tell anyone, but I think he might have actually carried them out.”  
“Seriously?”

“Oh, yeah. He was a demolitions expert, actually. They called him ‘Arnold Airburst’ because he knocked out a whole damn missile battery with just a few well-placed flechette grenades. Really weird dude, too, definitely unhinged enough to do something like it. Wouldn’t speak to anyone below his rank, preferred lone-wolf operations, that sort of thing. Couldn’t believe they let him work with explosives for a living.”

“How did you find out he was a, um, Templar, so to speak.”

“He was showing recruits how to pack in sand around supercombusters to make glass shrapnel and let slip that he’d first done it in there, so I grilled him after all the greenhorns were done out of curiosity, and he said it was classified.”  
“Anything else?”

“Well, he said he wouldn’t tell me even if he could, just kinda growled, you know? The next time I asked him about it all he said was that it ‘was a mistake’, and I didn’t get anything else out of him. Like I said, real weirdo.”  
“That’s not much to go on.”

“Oh, I dunno. It’s like a big game of elimination: An Army Special Forces operation in South America around the middle of the ‘20’s that was a big fuckup. Type that into a database, you get Operation Templar. Bing bang bong.”

“...That doesn’t help me at all…” Daley sighed.

“Well, excuse me. You’re the one who asked.”

“Yeah, I guess I did. Bye now.” He hung up.

Arnold. It probably wasn’t the guy’s real name, but it was a name, something Nene could cross-check with the rest. And yet, he still felt hollow, as though Bourne had sucked his will to make another call out with a straw.  
No, that wasn’t quite true. Operation Templar was a mistake, he knew that much. And maybe… maybe Nemesis had been in it? Maybe the reason he was so damn good at killing, better than even the Sabers, was because he’d gotten stuck in some heart-of-darkness op in… where? South America was an entire goddamn continent, an assortment of ex-colonies run by rigged elections and corporate juntas with plenty of uninhabited space to get lost in.  
But urban training would be necessary to augment his skillset. The Brazilians wouldn’t let Americans into their favelas, not a chance. Lima, then, or maybe Caracas. Or maybe Nemesis had never been inside a city larger than six million and that was just him making wild assumptions. Two more calls, then.

10:24 am

“Where the hell did you hear about Operation Templar?”

For once in his life, Staff Sergeant Cody Zhang actually sounded nervous, as though he’d been caught by a military tribunal with his finger up a West Point cadet’s rear end. He didn’t know Daley, of course, but Daley had checked a shortlist of Hong Kong expats in the military that he, as one himself, had a right to, and Cody Zhang, miracle of miracles, was a middle-manager for SOUMERCOM’s Resource Management Operations.

“Well, I’m with the Megatokyo ADP, and we have reason to believe that a former operator may be responsible for homicide and reckless violence against the citizens of our fair city, and we figure a motive might not hurt, you know? What can you tell me?”

“It was a regional stabilization operation. The United States of America saw freedom and liberal values being suppressed across the Amazon basin by non-national actors, and so we had no choice but to act. It shouldn’t have been traumatizing to any real soldier, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Really? It went well?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Well, what exactly happened? How bad was it?”

“The United States of America, with international permission for all of its actions, moved to provide islands of stability as the Amazonian region was being developed for new investment opportunities by multiple misaligned factions. That some factions misinterpreted this as an act of hostility was an unfortunate occurrence which the United States of America is under no obligation to correct under the present doctrine of self-determination.”

Self-Determination? Sure, and Vision was his bitchy ex-girlfriend. When Americans used that word, Daley always mentally tacked on “so long as the government in power is an ultraconservative business-friendly pseudo-democracy, and god help the guy who elects otherwise”.

“Alright. Thank you for your time.” He hung up - that was probably all he was going to get out of Zhang.

But things were getting interesting, now. ‘Islands of Stability?’ What in God’s name did that mean? And why Operation Templar? The Knights Templar had established monasteries in the Holy Land, something akin to ‘Islands of Stability’ - maybe the operation was supposed to be some sort of guerrilla fortress-building exercise? It seemed possible, maybe even probable.

But he’d hit a dead end, and he needed to recognize that. No phone call could squeeze out the juicy details of Nemesis’s identity. Nor, for that matter, could any phone call provide him with the insight needed to translate information into arrests.

At least Nene could help him with that first part - hopefully.  
____________________________________________________________________  
ADP Headquarters  
February 11, 2036  
10:15 am

The cake was good.

There really was no way to describe it. Adjectives, adverbs, nouns, all assailed the summit of Mount Chocolate Cake with verbal pickaxes and conjunctive sherpas and long-syllable dynamite, but none could reach the descriptive summit. The cake itself melted in her mouth like Hawaiian lava, slicked her salivary glands with pottery glaze; the frosting was cool and moist like a Canadian glacial lake on a summer afternoon, but still sweet with prokaryotic life. Every simile ended up sounding pretentious and overwritten. The cake was just that good.

Yeah, yeah, she needed to cut back. But if Sylia was right, she’d be out in her suit so much over the next few days she’d probably lose weight from all that exercise. Being a Knight Saber was, without a doubt, one of the best workouts a girl could get!

That being said, she didn’t have much else to do. The database had a separate search engine which she hadn’t downloaded, but of course she had spiders of her own to shuffle through the personnel list to find anything related to Operation Templar. Sure, it took awhile, but far less time than actually doing any hacking, so who was she to complain?

_Bing!_

Ah, there it was now, Operation Templar’s secrets (hopefully) laid bare before her. Nene tossed the paper plate in the trash, then swiveled back over to her computer.

  
The results weren’t encouraging at first glance. She had a list of personnel who had served operation about a thousand names long. Most of them, on closer inspection, were in auxiliary positions of some kind - there were a lot of names marked for ‘Convoy Support’, she noticed. A whole bunch of non-combat engineers, too, most with technical expertise in secure facility construction. Probably not Nemesis. So she scrolled up to the search terms and clicked a few check marks to narrow things down to those members of Operation Templar who had seen direct combat.

  
_Bing!_

  
Four hundred results. Awesome. Way more than expected, a pretty substantial chunk of the Army’s special forces for a military maneuver she hadn’t heard about until today, but she could work with that. Lots of veterans of previous operations, practically an entire battalion cut out of the Central African Republic brushfire wars and transplanted to ‘South America’, at a number of different ‘Monasteries’. But still, not good enough. She put in Jackson Ng to check his profile again...

_Bing!_

Okay… where’d he serve in South America? Monastery 14. Huh. That was all it said, but on some of the other profiles she clicked on they usually had specific locations or regions. Still, though, now all she had to do was specify combatants of Monastery 14…

_Bing!_

Awesome. Twenty-eight of SpecFor’s finest, all (hopefully) connected to Nemesis. She pulled out the photo of Leon’s ‘army guy’ and began opening profiles. First off was Staff Sergeant Shepard Cent, who had first served in the Philippine Interdiction around 2026, underwent training to become an Army Ranger in 2028, and, oddly enough, had no photo attached to his name.

  
Fine then. Corporal Andrea Iglesias, joined 2029, ping-ponged from Syria to Sri Lanka over the course of a few years until serving in Templar. She had a picture, a plain-looking Latina woman with two cybernetic eyes that seemed to move with her photo. Her role was… what, exactly? It didn’t say. In fact, it hadn’t said for Cent either despite the text field being right there. Something was wrong.

Okay, try guy number three. Jordan Piscitello, Lieutenant, served in Mexico from ‘24 to ‘30, dishonorably discharged. No picture, no training, no nothing.  
What the hell?

Sergeant Matthew Hemmer. No picture, no training, no nothing. Private Hu Qianlong, no records, no nothing. Corporal Ben Adams, nothing. Captain Gavin Belasko, nothing. Private Kim-Su Park, nothing. Captain Philip Barnes, nothing. Lieutenant America Hussein, nothing, nothing, nothing.

This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t possible. Someone had gotten into the database before her. Nemesis knew how to cover his tracks.

Nemesis was a really good hacker.

She screamed.  
____________________________________________________________________  
Daley was walking down the hallway to Nene’s office when he heard an awful screech emanate from its general direction. Training took over and he broke into a run, then a dead sprint, skidding to a halt outside her office, throwing open the door - and finding nothing but a very, very sad Nene.

“Um,” he said, “you called?”

She told him about the database issue, and in the telling, watched his brow furrow and his hand go to his chin. Then he told her about his own calls to military intelligence folk, and watched her face scrunch up and her head droop down in frustration.

“So,” Daley mumbled. “That is, well, that.”

Nene pressed her fingers against her temples, rubbing them in circles. “Fleet Hermes. It’s gotta be.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The hacker who popped up on the net right around the same time Nemesis showed up in town. His support team, probably. Punched holes in every database which could lead to incriminating information. Left us with forty names and no faces. Deleted stuff from the Pentagon archives without an automated scan picking up on it.”

“Could just be classification.”

“Not a chance,” Nene smirked. “I went in on a low-level request and picked up even Eyes Only-clearance stuff. Either Operation Templar was such a matter of national security they expunged the data without telling anyone-"

“So he’s better than you at hacking, huh?”

That set her off. For a brief moment Nene paused, her fingers clenched into claws over the keyboard. Then, with a forceful kick against the floor, she spun around with an expression on her face like she’d just seen Daley kill a puppy, and a glare that spoke of hatred hotter than suns.

“No one,” she said in a low voice, “is a better hacker than Nene Romanova. Not in this city. Not in this country. Not in the whole damn world.”

“I think it might be hard to gauge-”

“I said. No one. Is a better hacker. Than Nina ‘Nene’ Ushankavnya Romanova. No one.”

“I’m just saying-”

“No.”

“Isn’t that going-”

“NO.”

Daley had always assumed Nene was a good target for teasing, even about the things she obviously took great pride in. It was as though she had internalized Naoko’s dumb jokes and accepted that people saw her small figure and bubbly personality as an easy target. She was _moe_ , there was no denying it, and that was something she was just going to have to live with. But something about her demeanor now wasn’t _moe_ at all; the hair on the back of his neck wasn’t standing up or anything, but he had this nagging feeling that if he disputed her skills even Leon wouldn’t be able to find the body.

So Daley Wong, fearless AD Police Vice Inspector, the man who had faced down rampaging Boomers with disturbing frequency and yet continued to survive, spoke the meekest phrase he could imagine:

“Well, if you say so.”

“Weeell, I do.” And she was Nene again, sticking her head out and shaking her head in rhythm with each syllable, all but wagging her tongue, as though she hadn’t just revealed that her ego was more fragile than that of a US President.

Daley decided to change the subject. “We’ve still gotta cross-check the immigration database. Like Leon said, if at least one of our Templars came in through the front door…”

“Sure, sure, fine, whatever. And Fleet Hermes probably punched holes in that, too. Or he went under a fake name or something.” She clearly was moping now, her head slowly angling downward. “We’re at a dead end. We’re flying blind.”

“Leon’ll probably turn up some results, though. All the desk jockeying in the world can’t compare to some real on-foot detective work, yeah?”

“That’s assuming he can survive Anderson, and arresting half the damn Yakuza while he’s at it…”

Daley snickered. “Yeah. I don’t know which one scares me more.”


	3. Chapter 22: Waking the Dragon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rumblings of things to come; Nemesis makes his preparations.

In retrospect, February 11, 2036, would be remembered as a day of peace. Of course, it was no such thing - there was never a day in Megatokyo when the city could be said to sleep, or even to rest, or even to stop seething with pent-up resentment spilling over into strange acts of violence in places best forgotten by the body public.

  
And really, public figures would later observe, February 11 was drenched in even more violence than usual. People would forget in time, but Nemesis’s first strike had set a good half of the city on a monofilament’s edge. Fists were clenched. Nails dug bloody into palms.

For the addicts, the unemployed once-salarimen and the pseudoepinephrine- injecting executive alike, found themselves without the supply of certain stimulants they had reorganized their lives around.

For the lesser hardmen who manned Shikichi Sato’s legitimate businesses closed their shops without so much as an explanation - Nemesis had gone after Fu-Shui, yes, and there was a drug lab there, yes, but who was to stop him from going after the clean operations? Would he even care to tell the difference? Better to lock up, then, grab some guns, and wait it out. If anyone came in looking for a fix, and they wouldn’t leave - well.

For the man on the street heard of one man killing two hundred in a single night, and innocent or not, they knew that such a monster - such a killing machine - could snuff them out without resistance if it desired their deaths. The Knight Sabers only killed Boomers, which meant they were safe from them by virtue of being fleshy, but now there were no guarantees.

Still, though, the same public figures would agree that memory had done its job, synthesizing February 11 into a nostalgic past against which to compare everything else. And memory did not deceive, for once, if one thought of it in relative terms.  
After all, everyone knew that what came after February 11 was nothing short of a time that would live in infamy.  
____________________________________________________________________  
District 15  
February 11, 2036  
2:30 am

To hear the average Megatokyonite tell it, the trouble began with Boomers.

Then again, anything that could be classified as ‘trouble’ in Megatokyo probably began with Boomers. In fact, anything with a distinct beginning, middle, and end would probably somehow begin with Boomers.

But these were not regular Boomers, they might say. But that was a useless statement. There was no such thing as a regular Boomer, just as there was no such thing as a regular human. Like life, they mutated, adapted, specialized, were inconsistent. But they did not live, of course. Everyone knew that.

So why these Boomers? To hear the average Megatokyonite tell it, after several shots of something with more than 10% alcohol, it was the tankmen.

Tankman. Bu-12b Battle Boomer, product of the GENOM Corporation. Tankman. Made explicitly to replace the ageing MBT’s of armies across the world, but just a little more agile, a little more clever, a little better at urban encounters, turning armored tactics into infantry ones. Tankman. 46mm railcannon, purposefully underpowered to about mach 1. The explosive was supposed to be the killer, not the sheer force of impact and overpenetration. 12.7mm quadbarreled gatling cannon to wipe up whatever was left. Tankman. Sold incredibly well, especially to the JSDF, especially considering they were illegal to possess within Japan’s borders. Tankman. Not just a harbinger of bad news, but bad news in and of themselves.

In 2032, two 12b units - Tankmen - en route to the harbor for export to some obscure corner of the Philippines had spontaneously activated, broke free of their restraints, and proceeded to enact search-and-destroy protocols without a definite target to search for. Old Shibuya, a stretch of old Tokyo metropolis which had barely survived the quake as a shadow of its former self, ripped itself apart at the teasing of their railcannons, as glass scabs were ripped off of skyscrapers and hyperdense asphalt capillaries shattered and bled into one another.

System shock, the rippling of information across invisible nerves, meant that even the forty million who lived outside of Shibuya heard about the rampage as it was happening, watched through opticam livestreamers, felt the same hindbrain-liquefying terror they did, reacted all at once.

How had this happened? Shibuya was one of the nicer districts, one of the ones GENOM wanted to actually preserve. It was supposed to be safe, it was supposed to be a place where Boomer attacks or rampages or rampancies didn’t happen period. Where were the ADP? Oh, they were there alright, but even an APC with a full squad of officers in full body armor with short 10mm machineguns couldn’t do much more than be part of the burning scenery. They brought in the K-12’s, those beautiful angular clusters of polygons that somehow fit together into a human form, and those were supposed to be invincible. And for a while, they had been. Then the city traded two powersuits for two Boomers, and it understood.

Forty-one died.

Two days later, ostensibly as a response to the destruction of a public housing project minutes after mass eviction, the Knight Sabers had a response. None of them died, but the morning after Brian J. Mason, Head of Internal Security for GENOM, was found on the top of the Tower in an outdated powersuit with his throat cut and the Sabers’ logo burned into the concrete. The implications were clear: The ADP will die with you, the saying went, but the Knight Sabers will make someone else die for you.

And for a while, the city went on with its affairs, unconcerned by Tankmen, jolted into that same state of fear by particle-beam strikes and quadrupedal crab-mecha, hoping something like that wouldn’t happen again.

It was, of course, too much to hope for. The city burned again in ‘34, and again in the corporate skirmishes of ‘35, and every time the hammerhead spectre of the Tankman was there, railcannons ripping open the city so Labor Boomers could heal it again. In those days, the most prosperous city on earth was content to think of itself as a war zone, a manmade natural disaster to be responded to with a Japanese sort of tenacity. The Ring of Fire would grind against itself, the sea would rise and surge across the earth, particle-beam satellites would burn streaks of hypercombusted material as though Amaterasu herself had taken a sword to the islands, and the hammerheaded Tankmen would, demon-like, appear ex nihilo to fulfill bloody purposes they did not understand themselves.

Which was why when Shinji Takemori, age thirty-five, stumbling piss-drunk to his coffin home in the Fault, saw something which looked like a horizontal tumor made out of sensory equipment fused with a four-meter anthropomorphic crab emerge from an unmarked building, red eye clusters glimmering, he promptly relieved himself, after a fashion, screamed two octaves higher than normal, and ran.  
____________________________________________________________________  
In Yokohama, Fujiko Minne, hostess at the Wilted Blossom Bar, beat on her neighbor’s door screaming incoherency. When the landlord finally woke up and dragged her down, she told him that she’d been walking home after a long night of attending to customers in an absolutely legal way, she swore, the marks on her arm were just mosquito bites, and she’d seen Tankmen, Tankmen! It looked like one of them had been praying, somehow, kneeling down and grasping the foundation of a yet-to-be-finished apartment building like it was a god, and then the others had just looked at her, didn’t shoot her but just looked at her. And there were Tankmen.

In Chinatown, Chu Sen-Sheng, perpetually bedraggled insomniac, left his sleeping wife to check the shop, and his safehouse for the Hou Bang underneath said shop. The shop was fine. The safehouse had an odd-looking Boomer in it, rifling through his storage like it was looking for something, which turned and bolted the minute he raised his sawed-off shotgun, scrambling cockroachlike through a hole in the ceiling. Sheng looked through the hole, and there were Tankmen.

In Chiba, Kaori Tendoh woke up early to take the monorail over to the fish market, when she heard what she would later describe as a ‘horrible scraping noise, followed by a loud rattling, like someone was throwing something about’. She went out onto the street, hours before the sun was to come up, and saw two tall shapes ripping her car into pieces before setting it on fire, then, as one, hurling it into a nearby storefront. She looked at them, and they did not look at her, and there were Tankmen.

In Shinjuku, Sylia Stingray woke up hours after all the commotion, and found that her trawler program had picked up multiple mentions of Tankmen on Megatokyo social media. She grabbed the paper and a coffee, and decided that it would be wise to close the Ladys633 for today.

After all, if Sato was bringing out tankmen, she needed to scramble those fourth-gen upgrades soon. Mallory and Nemesis had brought missiles and miniguns and Hind gunships to the table, had turned superheroism into out-and-out warfare.

Now it was time for her to play catchup.  
____________________________________________________________________  
Holton Junkyard Co.  
District 5  
February 11, 2036  
5:26 pm

Their existence had become almost nocturnal, and who could blame them? By day, they slept, hid from investigators and predators, let the Boomers sniff infrared somewhere else, repaired the hardsuits, made purchases. At night, Nemesis did his work, and they watched and hoped that this time, he’d walk out unharmed, no cracked ribs or twisted ankles or any of the dozen little ways the body could warp out of its desired proportions, betraying the conscious mind’s will. They had three more days, ideally

Sarge hadn’t gone back to Gamble; the cops likely already had the arms dealer set up to look out for him. But Nemesis needed arms all the same. So at oh-six-hundred he had laid out a shopping list on a sheet of scratch paper, and had woken Gavin up to get his cooperation.

“First off,” he had said, “no more minigun rounds. We’ve still got something like fourteen thousand rounds left, and the only man in the city we can reach who sells the antipersonnel types is Gamble.”

Okay. Railgun rounds?

“I don’t see myself using that many flechettes anymore - Maria says that Sato’s got enough Boomers to take on a third-world nation and win, and we know now that he is using them. It may be time to mount the big railgun on the hardsuit, probably swap out the plasma torch to compensate for the power load.”

So he was using the light hardsuit again? That would mean more grenades, right?

"I don't really have a choice. My target's got too many cramped spaces for the heavy hardsuit, but I need some serious demolitions to sink it."

Sink it?

"See if you can't get some more of those RDX charges, refill the usuals. I'm gonna get some sleep."

Sarge left.  
____________________________________________________________________  
Now, the sun was setting early, as winter’s dry grip dragged it down in a matter of minutes, and they were all back at the table, ammo restocked, hardsuits repaired, funds spent, Starbucks distributed evenly among them. Maria didn’t drink coffee, of course - she was more a hypercaffinated lychee tea girl.

“Today,” Gavin said, “is Day Two of Operation Susanoo. As before, we seek to utterly dismantle the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza within the span of four days, before they can arm up and before this becomes a full-blown gang war. We have already woken our Yamato-no-Orochi, and removed his lesser heads. Yet it is now that we must face our most vicious target.”

“Oh, man,” Doc said, exasperated. “We’re doing the day-two plan again? I hate to be the asshole in the room, but I always felt it was too risky.”

“Which is why we do things like this, Doctor,” Maria said. Taking a sip from her light green beverage, she continued, “Sato has bulked up his defenses significantly, installing combat and battle Boomers in almost all of his operations. In addition, he has a roving group of strike-force Boomers in play, even heavier than his defense forces, which will probably perform a function similar to the Jaegers; respond to any immediate threats to any of his major businesses, let smaller strikes pass, and maybe retaliate against any incursions by the other gangs. And to be honest, I don’t see even my bro here handling that strike force super well, especially if they try to bog him down in a firefight. And we can’t exactly ask for backup ourselves.”

“So,” Gavin said, “Just as we did with Yvon Heuse, we need to catch our opponent off balance. He’s prepared for several smaller strikes, perhaps taking out a lieutenant or two, but he’s not prepared for a high-stakes decapitation strike where he thinks he is already invincible. If we pull this off, Sato may donate more Boomers to the Strike Force, weakening defenses for days three and four - we’re essentially sending contradictory messages in terms of tactics.”

“Awight,” Smitty said. “So I assume you’ve got some really big-shot second-in-command or something you want to smash up a bit?”

“I do.” Gavin got up, tapped a button on the side of the table, and leaned over as the screen bathed his green eyes in blue light.

The holoprojection was a conical white wireframe structure, rotating solemnly, revealing progressively more detail as the rendering software did its work. It looked like four hexagonal mountains with legs, arranged in a triangular pattern with the largest one at the center, all connected by fragile tubes, all rent by deep gouges in their superstructure.

“The Underbelly,” Gavin intoned. “It used to be part of Aqua City, a land reclamation project designed as one of the world’s first self-contained megastructures. Designed after Abe-san’s successors needed a project to top the Olympics, supposed to essentially serve as a city within Tokyo which would house up to three million residents out on the Bay.”

“The quake caused the project to be abandoned, even though the contractors built the actual megastructure independently of the seawall and pilings which were supposed to help reclaim the land, as GENOM would not accept competing construction companies in its monopolization of the rebuilt Tokyo. Most of the platforms were sunk by a particle beam strike in 2032, but these four, designed as a massive desalinization plant and stacked agricultural facility, were out of the way and thus survived.”

“So where’s the Yaks come in?” asked Sarge.

“Good question,” Maria piped up. “Basically, it turned out the folks who built the thing were still getting stipends from the Japanese government, even though they’d been bought out by a Taiwanese private equity group right after the quake, since the quote-unquote land was still useable. After the particle beam strikes, the group panicked and sold the rights to the first bidder, and that was none other than Shichiki Sato.”

She flicked the wireframe upright, looking directly into the hole in the center of the main platform, dragged her fingers outward to zoom in, then tapped something in its innards to cut the platform in two; it revealed a massive concrete amphitheater with a sunken arena.

“The main platform was built around a 75-million-gallon water holding tank with a nanopore membrane around the bottom. It was supposed to filter seawater passing through, as well as desalinize it, and then provide the city with cheap water with the passing of the tides.” She highlighted parts of the amphitheater-tank in red: benches, loudspeakers, food stands.

“Of course, Sato turned it into a coliseum where Boomeroids from the outer districts and repurposed Boomers beat the snot out of one another. It’s far and away his single largest operation, probably brings in as much money as the Coliseum in Rome did back in the day. Pretty typical for a Yakuza.”

Doc shrugged. “He’s a businessman. Considering they’ve got that nanomembrane tech all over the place now, it stands to reason he’d try to find an untapped market, and hey, violence sells.”

Gavin’s face was grim. “I’d appreciate you not attempting to sympathize with the enemy. Regardless, the offices of the Underbelly will undoubtedly have a great deal of free cash and potentially direct access to incriminating evidence, something I was not able to grab from the Fu-Shui’s safe. Which brings us to the strike.”

He tapped the button again, and wireframe stickmen stuttered into existence alongside the bulky forms of Boomers patrolling the ring.

“While the underbelly’s manager, a man by the name of Senjuku Inoue, has received personal protection in the form of a 55C and a pair of 35C’s, Sato apparently has made no motions to upgrade the security of the arena; there was no need. The Underbelly apparently already has not only dozens of modified Boomers equipped for melee combat, plus a neverending stream of cyberpsychotics from the Outer Districts and heavily armored Yakuza to keep them in line, but seven 55C’s, and two Goblins, neither of which were counted in Sato’s greater strike force.”

“So they’re hiding something,” Smitty mused, “Something big enough that they wouldn’t divert those resources towards the strike-force plan. I’d bet that the agricultural blocks are growing drugs, maybe even bioweapons. Rest of it doesn’t sound so bad though.”

  
“...And they’ve lined the underwater portion of the superstructure with Point Defense Turrets."

"Eesh."  
“No, that’s good,” Sarge said. “It means there are underwater entrances worth protecting, and if Gavin can slip past those turrets, he doesn’t have to enter via the land entrances and might be able to remain undetected even while using the Heavy Hardsuit.”

“Exactly,” Maria said. “The automated security down there only scans in periodic sweeps, so my big bro’s gonna dive past a sweep, squeeze in through some ruined corridor, work his way up through the greenhouses, and then-” here she traced a yellow ring around the top of the half-cone “-break into Inoue’s penthouse, grab whatever he can find, off everyone he sees, then come back out the way he came. Easy-ish.”

Gavin sighed, leaning back. “Maria, you neglected to mention that there’s no direct route from the greenhouses to the penthouse - and once I step into the central block, it’ll be nearly impossible to move without triggering an alarm. My plan is to set charges around the support pillars holding the whole thing up, which I can periodically detonate as distractions for the security forces. Then, once I have what I need, I blow enough charges to sink the Underbelly for good, and head out the way I came, ideally before Sato’s strike force comes to back up the security.”

Maria and Sarge nodded sagely. “Sounds good to me,” Sarge said. “I’ll go and get the truck loaded.”

Smitty got up. “So we’re done, then? I can get back to my work?”

Gavin and Maria rose. “You can,” he said, and walked out without a word, heading to the hardsuit bay.

Only Doctor Roland Vicain remained, lost in thought.

He’d always been against the whole idea of the ‘mega-strike’, as Maria had once called it, even after it saved his ass from Heuse, but he could never give a rational reason why. It worked, it had worked almost every time before, even up against what he thought would be more distributed networks like biker gangs. Maybe it was just his disposition towards the least risky outcome, his almost pathological need for certainty, that kept him from endorsing these strikes wholly. But he knew where he stood. He had nowhere to go, no corp to take him on that wouldn’t also lock him up with another experimental powersuit for years on end. Gavin didn’t take questions well, but at least he took questions, so who was he to complain?

And yet, and yet. The plan wasn’t airtight, it wasn’t supposed to be, just flexible enough for improvisation and Nemesis’s trademark ruthlessness. You had to give a guy like Gavin space to cut loose, and that was good.

But there was one thing he couldn’t shake: the sinking of the platform. Even if the Underbelly’s support platforms had survived the quake, he knew they wouldn’t survive if Gavin used the right explosives against them. And then the Boomers and the Yakuza would desperately scramble to get off the thing and avoid him entirely. Maybe the land entrances would hold, maybe they wouldn’t. But he hoped they would.

Otherwise Nemesis would have killed innocents for the very first time.


	4. Chapter 23: The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Also My Enemy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang alliance begins to take shape, while the Knight Sabers make plans for the night.

**District 10 - Pier 334**

**February 11, 2036**

**6:26 pm**

The sun had already set by the time Jimmy Chee’s personal Rolls-Royce, a red limo with a gaudy silver dragon pattern running along its side, pulled out of his private garage in southern Shinjuku. He began the long and arduous drive to Megatokyo’s eastern waterfront district. He sat through the nightly rush hour on the city’s streets, crossed over highways strained to their limit by the destruction of the coastal thoroughfare, towards a part of the city the Triads had, admittedly, very little control over.

Well, the Russians were old hands on most of the western waterfront, in old Kawasaki, but they weren’t familiar with Chiba, and the Red Willow stuck to their guns in the old city. It was to be a meeting on neutral ground, where nobody had enough sway to set up some dumbass trap in advance. It was Chung’s idea, but even he preferred to stick to his haunts in Little Manila. And it wasn’t Karns’ territory, either. They weren’t _that_ stupid.

Actually, if one were to carve up Megatokyo into gang territory, District 10 would be marked as belonging to the Sleeping Dragon. Once, they would have treaded lightly through there, but now Chee had brought his loudest gang colors to the edges of Sato’s turf. He knew, now, that he could get away with it.

It should have been a time for celebration, and yet the so-called Master of Vice sat alone in the back of his limousine, without women or drugs or even any good booze except for a lone can of warm banana daiquiri. He figured he would cut his best deals while sober, but the concept of sobriety itself was proving more difficult than he thought it would.He said nothing to his driver, and his driver said nothing to him. Instead, Jimmy Chee looked out the window over the highway and thought.

How badass did he want to be tonight? Clearly, he had to go a little overboard, but how overboard? He hadn’t brought a cigar because the intimidation factor was useless in the open air, but now he was thinking maybe he should have brought _something_ , or maybe not, maybe the whole idea of putting aside his vices for a business meeting would make it clear he was not to be fucked with. Yeah, he’d go with that. Chung would think it odd, Iwasaki would be impressed, maybe Smirnovski would think him too eager to please others, that could be problematic.

Well, really, just spending time thinking about all this shit was being too eager to please others. He was Jimmy Fucking Chee. He ran the whole goddamn Suan Tou Fung Triad. He cut people’s fingers off as part of a daily routine, pulled toenails when he got bored. He didn’t need to panic. He _was_ looking his best, in a red suit with a classic Chinese palace scene embossed in gold across the jacket, and jet black Afghan leather shoes with little golden ornamental spurs. This wasn’t the kind of suit he put on for girls, this was his suit for dealing with _men_.

Now the car pulled off the highway, and eased down a road where there were almost no cars at all. When they came behind a nondescript eighteen-wheeler carrying a large cargo crate marked DESCENT FROM HEAVEN IMPORTS, Chee nodded, and his driver signaled to the other truck. Soon, the behemoth was following his car at a leisurely pace, slipping through the all-but-abandoned roads with all the stealthiness of a grizzly bear.

The buildings became larger and more nondescript as they approached the waterfront, before finally morphing into sprawling warehouses packed with thousands of shipping crates, wall to wall. He could see other headlights, shapes moving behind warehouses on other roads, but let his driver continue.

Finally, the eighteen-wheeler still trailing behind, they came to a stop at the docks, the car just barely edging into the open space. From three other directions, other headlights approached. As in Chee’s case, each pair of headlights hid a miniature convoy of luxury car and high-capacity truck. Wordlessly, he stepped out, his heels clicking on the grey concrete.

He leaned against the car and looked around. The big black van which looked like it could ram a tank off the road was Smirnovski, definitely, ever the brutalist. The big GMC 2500 pickup opposite him with all the guys huddled in the back was Chung. Bastard had to bring his security detail with him everywhere he went, or he was just trying to show off. Which left Iwasaki in the silver Mitsubishi Daimyo, a low-riding luxury car with ball tires, whose curves somehow reminded Chee of his old mistresses naked together in the shower.

One by one, they got out and saw one another, the Pacific lapping against the pier in the background. No one wanted to be the first to speak; that would be a sign of weakness.

Chee looked at Smirnovski. Smirnovski looked at Chung. Chung looked at Iwasaki. Iwasaki made a face, and then said:

“Well, that escalated quickly.”

Chung snorted, then laughed, doubled over. Iwasaki snickered, chuckled, then made a keening sound that was supposed to be laughter but evidently wasn’t. The shady men in the back of Chung’s pickup giggled, but it was obvious their heart wasn’t in it.

“What the everloving fuck is so funny?” Smirnovski barked.

“You know. ‘Gee, things sure have es-cal-ay-teed quickly,’” Chung said in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. Iwasaki smiled a tight smile. “It’s understatement, it’s hilarious.”

“I don’t think that making light of our situation at this stage in the game will improve it any,” Smirnovski deadpanned. “Sato has deployed the full extent of his forces, practically an invading army bent on pacifying Megatokyo. He has over a dozen BU-12b units, each with the fighting power of a main battle tank. If we do not take his actions seriously, those 12-b’s will have our heads on pikes. I hope, for all your sakes, you have armored vehicles at hand.”

“Regrettably,” said Chung, “My friends and I are a little lacking in the ‘tank’ department. We’ve simply been suffering under the delusion that we operate in a dense urban environment where a tracked vehicle could easily be hindered, slowed down, made an easy target - whatever - and simply put out of commission with a well-placed RPG.”

“Ah,” Smirnovski grunted, “to simply think of a tank displays a lack of creativity which suits you, Billy. An APC or hovercraft can take on just a smidge less armor and still maintain the agility you fear is so necessary. I understand, of course, if such devices are not within your means currently-”He trailed off, letting the silence speak for him.

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa,” said Chee. “Ease off of it Adrik. We’re all friends here.”

Chung snorted and motioned to the men in the back of the truck. They lept to the ground as one. Chung could see that they were all wearing hoods, and carrying what looked like Magnum AR’s, blocky monster guns that served as compact LMG’s to a regular human and small carbines to the average Boomer. They had to be somewhere in between, then. Most likely cyborgs.

“We are not _friends_ ,” he said. “We are enemies with a common cause. No more, no less. And I do not tolerate those who doubt my people’s capability, enemy or _friend_.”

“No one is doubting your backup, Chung,” Chee replied, stepping with his arms out like a boxing ref. “Smirnovski brought heavy armor, you brought, uh, _infantry_. Our little anti-Sato army needs both.”

“Quite correct,” said Iwasaki. “If he has so many 12-b’s, Sato will likely have even more 55-C’s and 35-C’s, plus a few other small surprises he hasn’t shown yet. An APC with a machinecannon can easily engage a 12-b, but let us not forget that multiple 55-C’s grouping up with their mouth cannons active could pose just as potent a threat.”

Jimmy frowned. He hadn’t thought of that, but by God he was going to capitalize on it. “Exactly. Brilliant. Couldn’t have said it better myself, Iwasaki. We’re scrambling, here, anyway. We’ll mop up the Terminator-dudes, then let Nemesis and the Sabers handle the tanks until we can call in enough out-of-town resources.”

“So you mean to say you have no anti-armor resources at all? That seems somewhat impractical,” Iwasaki said.

Backstabbing bastard. “Oh, come on. I tried to buy a mecha or two from the Chang Group years ago, and every time I thought I was gonna talk to a representative one of Sato’s goons popped up and told me he’d take my purchase as an act of war. Of course I backed off. What would you have done?”

Iwasaki smiled again, but instead of the aw-shucks grin he had before, this was a wicked smile, a watch-as-I-prove-my-inherent-superiority-to-you-scum smile. “I would have just used a bit more subtlety in my work. It is difficult to move armor under the Sleeping Dragon’s snout, but it is not impossible for the diligent criminal.”

“What the fuck do you mean, diligent?”

“I mean exactly what I say, O Master of Vice.”

“Well, excuse me for not running my triad like some dead-eyed salariman. I like to have _fun_ , you know?”

“I like to have fun too, Mister Chee, I simply am willing to put aside what I want for what is good.”

“Oh please. You wouldn’t know a beautiful woman if she bit your c-”

 _Shack-chick_.

All eyes fell on Smirnovski, who had just audibly jammed an extended magazine into a chrome-plated AKM assault rifle, and was now pointing the weapon skyward.

“While,” he intoned, taking a breath, “I appreciate a bit of man-on-man dick-waving as much as the next hot-blooded Russian man, I believe we were to meet, first and foremost, to display our elite units, what we have collected besides gangsters and middling Boomers, and to plan a strategy around their strengths and weaknesses. If you are unable to do this, I would be more than happy to fire several rounds into the air to alert an ADP unit as to our location. While I might be arrested, the simple cosmic justice of the thing would be more than satisfactory. Do I make myself clear?”

Silence. “Okay, then. Since Chee is so agitated tonight, let us allow him to display his wares first to relieve tension. I will go second, Chung third, Iwasaki fourth. I believe there _should_ be no objections to this plan.”

Jimmy shrugged. “Fine by me,” he said. It wasn’t, of course, but Adrik had a point. Arguing over the order of reveals was ultimately useless, even if he would have rather seen the armor the Russian seemed to be humblebragging about before he showed of his own stuff.

He fished a cigarette out of his jacket (he kept at least a pack in every one of his suits as a precaution), then went back over to the truck, where his driver had a lighter ready. Ciggie in hand, he banged on its side, just below the M in IMPORTS, and watched as several dozen shadows whispered out of the back and passed him by. Then, all slow and smooth, he strolled back to face the others.

They were Boomers, that much was clear. The red fish-eyes and grey, rippling bulk of their musculature were distinctly Boomer. But they were smaller than 55-C’s, anthropomorphic in posture but animalian in countenance, their limbs sticking out starkly, as though they’d been twisted back from the position they were supposed to have, their faces dominated by short, snarling snouts and twin fangs the size of daggers. Clutching guns of various sizes in their not-quite-paws, they twitched restlessly, clawed the ground with their not-quite-feet.

“We call ‘em Werecats,” Chee smirked. “Took thirty-nine K-9 Boomers, swapped out the heads and brains for cats, and tweaked the musculature and skeleton so they can swap from quadrupedal to bipedal in a millisecond without sacrificing power, agility, _or_ speed in either form. They’ve got pack hunter’s instincts and a supersoldier’s gunfighting prowess, completely silent-”

“Anything _else_?” said Chung.

“The usual handful of 55 and 35-C’s, a whole bunch of those Fire-Bee minicopters I bought surplus after the ADP cancelled their contract in ‘33, _and_ I might be able to bring in some even better air support given time. Hell, if you guys chip in, I can lean on the Hou Bang, see if they’d be willing to sell me a GD-42. Pretty impressive, yeah?”

Iwasaki slicked his hair back. “Certainly a creative use of the K-9s, I will give you that. I am not certain how well they’d perform against fully armed 55-C’s, but you could overwhelm them with numbers if you were to produce a few more. The Fire Bees were abandoned for a reason, though, and I fear for the wellbeing of your associates if you were to strap them into those aerial deathtraps.”

Chee shrugged. “I’d say the ADP just fucked up when they used synchro-helmets instead of proper implants, but okay, you can be a pussy about it. What’ve you got, Adrik?”

The grin which broke across Smirnovski’s face should not have belonged to a human being.

“Watch and learn, kitty-boy.”

From the shadows behind him, two, three, four pairs of floodlights slammed into existence, steadily growing, as the contours of two, three, four broad shapes grew behind them, formed into the shapes of four trucks that were at once massive, angular and ominous, and at the same time just a little smaller than Chee thought they would be.

His shadow long under their headlights, Smirnovski gestured openly. “You see?” he said. “Five UralVagonZavord Perun Urban Fighting Vehicles. A lovely hybrid between a big-rig with armor on it and a bigass tank, scaled down explicitly for long-term urban conflicts where you don’t want something so big it cracks the pavement. A second cousin of mine works in UVZ, he knows a guy who does smuggling on the Trans-Eurasian rail, and my boys dressed them up for some,” here he paused, clearly struggling with a word he would not normally use, “badassery.”

Jimmy looked them over. They did look like some sort of ungodly hybrid between a _dekotora_ and a T-72, angular plating done up with LED spraypaint in rainbow-oil patterns, two pairs of headlights glaring out over a spiked front. The contrast was startling, especially when one considered what looked like short machineguns poking out of the sides, plus the bigass twin turret on each truck’s top. One cannon, he noted, had a strand of Christmas lights wrapped around it, but switched off; evidently Smirnovski had his limits.

Actually, Chee thought, this was very interesting. From what he knew, Adrik Smirnovski ran his mafia like a goddamn zaibatsu, with little to no money to spare on his members’ exotic tastes. They were Russians, after all. Their sense of luxury could be satisfied with flavored vodka, and so what Chee would have spent on nineteen-year-old girls Smirnovski spent on buying AK’s from his buddies on the mainland in bulk. To not only buy very expensive armored vehicles, but to allow his men to put Stalin’s face on the side of one in pulsating light, rays of sun alternating off the Great Leader’s forehead - was this really ‘badassery’, or just Smirnovski’s underlings trying a bit of stress relief? Either way, Chee had to give him some credit, to bring out armored cars that looked like gay pride murals and act totally serious, so he kept his trap shut - as did everyone else.

“Let us make haste,” Iwasaki snapped off at last. “Chung, did your associates provide you with anything besides a guard force?”

Chung did not recoil at that, though his security detail did.

“They did,” he drawled. “And my men are no mere guard force. Boys, show them.”

At once, like a trained army, they stepped, or shambled forward. His security detail or whatever it was had to be at least ten men – except they weren’t men, not really. Each one of them was horrifically unique, and yet all the same, all amalgams of metal and plastic jammed into puckered flesh, some Japanese, some Filipino, some barely identifiable as anything. One in particular had a sheen of faded plastic covering his face, like a superhero mask, and two gleaming green eyes that were pinpoint dilated; he toyed with what appeared to be an M202 grenade launcher, randomly pointing the monstrous weapon at nothing, as though it were simply a large pistol.

“Boomeroids,” Iwasaki said haltingly. “Y-you hired _Boomeroids_.” He reached into his pocket for what looked like a remote, took it out, fondled a red button without pressing it.

For the first time that night, Chung looked more at ease. “I believe the term they prefer is cyborgs,” he said. “It turns out that there are many _cyborgs_ in the Outer Districts and near the Fault who are too proud to submit to society’s definition of their subhuman status, and too wise to accept Sato’s offer to be ripped limb from limb by construction Boomers in the Underbelly’s rigged fights.”

“Can’t they speak for themselves?” Smirnovski asked. The green-eyed one nodded, then raised its middle finger in his direction.

“Stage fright,” the cyborg rumbled in a smoker’s voice. “They are afraid, for the dramatis personae rise to take the stage, and they are of such dirty flesh, like they hoped to forget.”

“Are you calling me dirty-“

“Such is the way of the half-pure, to be tempted by the smoothness of the meat! How we yearn to return to the way of dignified tumors in the system of the Great Machine!” The cyborg swung its arms out, eyes to the sky, stumbling backwards. He was clearly reciting something from memory, the way his actions seemed to stiffen up, become more than barely restrained twitching. “Flesh calls, and we must descend, ascend, to answer! O Virgin, grant me strength against this dunderhead! Grant me the cleanliness of patience!”

Smirnovski opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “The Virgin?”

“Not important. The point is, I have enough cyborgs working with me, and enough heavy weapons to equip them, that we will be able to handle Sato’s legions of humans with little effort. The Boomers will be isolated, forced to work without support, and even Boomers need support, do they not?”

“Need I remind you I was the one who came up with the infantry idea first?” Chee hissed.

Chung looked at Chee, lips pursed. “We’ll see how well your Werecats do against proper Combat Boomers. My boys ain’t Knight Sabers, and they ain’t trying to be.”

It was at this point that Jimmy Chee began to lose patience with his partners. He didn’t trust them, of course, but he hadn’t anticipated that they would be so annoying. His Werecats were badass and no one could tell him otherwise.

Maybe… Maybe the fourth member of their little party would appreciate his genius? After all, it wasn’t as though the Red Willow had much to offer. They took their vows of bodily purity pretty seriously. Except…

Tomasuki Iwasaki was smiling. Scratch that, he was _grinning_.

Jimmy knew Iwasaki well enough, and he knew that the head of the Red Willow Yakuza smiled for nothing. Once, before the Kanto Quake, before Japan had opened its doors to anyone who could help them restore everything that had been lost, Iwasaki’s father had been fighting a losing battle against the slightly more ruthless Sleeping Dragon. It had been a war of tradition versus modernity, so they’d said, and Megatokyo was a city which wore its modernity on its sleeve. So Tomasuki Iwasaki didn’t just have a stick up his ass, clinging to tradition like a Kyoto restauranteur, he _wore_ tradition like a twelve-layered kimono in a desperate attempt to hide his fundamental disappointment with the world.

Yeah, and he was smiling like one of those kids in the GENOM commercials who just got their first Boomer. It was unnerving.

“Well,” Iwasaki said, “I think that we have all contributed to our alliance… sufficiently. But it has always been my habit, when doing these sorts of things, to contribute more than I should. It really is a quite disconcerting flaw of mine. Nonetheless, I think it safe to say that tonight… we should save the best for last.”

And then he clapped. Once, twice, thrice, hands raised to head height.

And then something, some _things_ clapped behind him in the darkness. Once, twice, thrice, metal smashing against metal in the back of storage truck.

And then he saw them.

Five mecha, each about twice as tall as a man, stomping into view. Humanoid, barely, with a single cyclopean camera mount jutting out of a boxy cockpit that reminded Chee, somehow, of his Uncle Wang’s pot belly. Two pairs of arms, one practically fused to the cockpit, clutching a man-sized submachinegun, ammo belt dangling from the gun’s feed. The other pair of arms were each as long as a car, and were mounted on what appeared to be some sort of circular rail system. And that, in turn, had two double missile tubes mounted on a second rail, which swiveled back and forth, resting on each of the other three men present before moving on.

“For your consideration, gentlemen,” Iwasaki boomed, “Five Type-9 battlemovers, freshly shipped from our dear friends in Seacouver. They’re highly modular, can convert between a wheeled mode or walking mode, and have some of the best pilots in the mercenary market piloting them. I daresay these will be our cavalry, the armored frontline, what we’ll use to repel Sato’s Boomer assaults so that all of your men can do the easy work of mopping up the remains.”

Now it was Smirnovski’s turn to get pissed off. “ _Easy_ work. You think I brought these very expensive UralVagonZavrod Perun fighting vehicles – the finest of good Russian engineering, _might I add_ – to do the easy work? I fear it is now you who underestimate our enemies, Iwasaki. Your battlemovers may be intimidating, but in the end a walking vehicle is just a bigger target with less armor.”

“You know,” said Chee, “You’ve really gotta chill on these things, Adrik. I’m sure your Oral-vagina-zappers will definitely be serving the very important role of _psychological_ warfare.”

He had never seen Smirnovski go red in the face like that before. Actually, he’d never seen the nebbishy little dude change his skin tone beyond polar bear white before. But the joke had just popped into his head, and the Type-9’s _were_ freaking him out, and he made lots of bad jokes under stress, and now he was thinking about his Uncle Wang and his big ol’ pot belly. What had happened to that poor bastard?

Oh, right, he’d fed him to a Boomer K-9 for sleeping with one of his mistresses. That had not been one of his better moments, admittedly.

“This from the man who brought us a bunch of fucking kitties?”

And now he was this close to feeding Adrik to a Werecat. “Yeah, kitties with machineguns. Way better than a handful of gay pickup trucks, but hey, that’s just me.”

“You know what, Chee? Sometimes you cannot chose how you look, and you roll with it. Perhaps you should try wearing cheaper suits more often, instead of going for that ‘male prostitute’ vibe, but _hey_ , that’s just me.”

“Really, because you know what a male prostitute looks like. Why am I not surprised?”

“If I did, would it make a difference? In the end, you look like you are dressing up to impress your betters, not to intimidate your inferiors. Take my advice, chink, and wear clothing befitting your rank.”

“You want rank? Rank? Motherfucker I’ll give you-“

 _BWOOM_.

It was only one round, only a lone report from a gun which wasn’t even meant to penetrate armor, and yet the whole lot seemed to wobble and shatter as the 17.5mm explosive round smashed into the asphalt. Ears only slightly ringing, Chee realized that he’d drawn his gun; he’d barely been aware he’d done it, and yet there it was, his gold-plated, mother-of-pearl-handled peashooter clutched in his hand, about to blow Smirnovski’s head open and end any chance of taking Sato down with it.

He looked toward the foremost Type-9, saw that its gun was still smoking. He had no idea who the pilot was, but he had to admit the guy knew how to make a point.

It felt like no one spoke for aeons. The wind came in, a cold wave of air coming off the ocean, and no one moved. In the end, it was Willie Chung who spoke first.

“I suppose we had better disperse, then, before the police round us all up. We’ll keep in touch via phone.”

And as he drove away, his Werecats having glumly packed themselves back into what seemed like a very conspicuous truck in retrospect, Jimmy Chee found himself dwelling on that dumbass ancient Chinese proverb his Uncle Wang used to say: “The enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine.”

Yeah, well, fuck that noise. There was another proverb, one he liked much more: “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

____________________________________________________________________________

**Life Is Fit Wellness Center**

**February 11, 2036**

**7:01 pm**

“Okay, everybody! It looks like that’s our time for today, so everyone hit the showers and have an awesome night!”

And with that, Linna Yamazaki’s Advanced Pliates class vanished from the workout room, exhausted but, she hoped, in good spirits. They would shower up, change back to regular work clothes, and presumably return to households where the kids loved the Boomer nanny more, and maybe the husband did too. That last part wasn’t just suspicion, either. Put middle-aged middle-class women in a room together, and even if they’re burning 500 calories in thirty minutes (which was Linna’s informal motto) they will gossip, and Linna had heard the same handful of stories from enough different people that she was fairly confident of that assumption.

She, on the other hand, had just worked a full day and a half of classes, ten hours from nine to seven with only a lunch break and a few swigs of water to keep her from collapsing. Now, well now she was so exhausted she _could_ just collapse. But in a good way. Definitely in a good way. Linna had done long stints like this before, when she knew they were going out a-Saber-ing that night, so she could just crash the day after and she wouldn’t be berated for skipping a few classes.

Okay, it wasn’t the best idea for her long-term health, and it probably raised a few flags on whatever government surveillance feed was watching her ass right now. But it sort of helped her get psyched up for beating the guts out of Boomers twice her size. And it was pretty much guaranteed they were going out tonight.

She’d read the news, kept up with the stream – Nemesis wasn’t going to stop at two hundred dead. It was a pretty big body count to rack up in one night, even in a hardsuit, but it was only the latest record from the vigilante; he’d racked up a hundred one night in Denver, then a hundred thirty-five in New Miami a month later, and so on. The guy wasn’t going to be fazed by his own ruthlessness, and he’d made a point of striking consecutively every night until his ‘work’ was done. He’d strike again tonight.

And the Knight Sabers, the champions of Megatokyo, were going to do something about it. Any minute now, Sylia would page her, she’d meet up at the Silky Doll with the rest of the gang, and Syila would have a plan all laid out, and they’d suit up and do it.

What would they do, exactly? She didn’t know. She hadn’t even seen the bodies. But the number kept on blaring in her mind.

Two hundred dead. Two hundred sons and daughters of two hundred mothers and two hundred fathers. Even GENOM’s preordained Boomer rampages took a good six months to kill

that many people. Sure, they hadn’t exactly been innocents, but the sheer magnitude of the thing! It was like slaughtering cattle. At least a Boomer could put up a reasonable fight against a hardsuit. Something had to be done, she didn’t know what. But right now that didn’t matter. Linna went to the women’s shower room, gossiped past her coworkers (Yes, Inoue-chan was having another baby! Her third, too! Oh, no, she couldn’t chip in for her class when she was on maternity leave, at least not for the next three weeks, she had a corporate wellness class booked solid, but after that she’d love to help her keep that salary!) and casually stripped, making sure that her eye would idly catch the dim red LED embedded in her bra which told her, _It’s go time, Linna Yamazaki-_

The LED wasn’t on. Her bra was completely, utterly, beige.

She almost yelped in shock, right in the middle of everyone, then caught herself. She’d have to check it out later – it was probably some sort of technical glitch, her sweat short-circuiting some key component in the quantum-entangled spinitronic chip. She quickly stripped, showered almost as quickly, then tried to scramble out of the shower without looking like she was in a hurry, failed miserably, and spent the next ten minutes having to chat-slash-listen-to a coworker she didn’t really like chat about idol culture (She did? Wow, really. I know, right? What a slut!).

Night had fallen hours ago, yet the streets of Megatokyo still glowed with the faded light of massive adscreens blasting LED nonsense through the darkness alongside holograms making their rounds, 3-d images flickering through six-second routines on the tops of buildings, or floating between them. Linna left the building, and wondered how Sylia would see this, what with those augshades she wore all the time; would algos compensate, wipe out the holograms, or would her connection to the AR holocloud make the semi-hallucinations be ever more present? Would they speak to her, too? Knowing Sylia, she probably custom-fabbed her own set with no internet connection. Speaking of which, she had a call to make.

She strolled down the street, fitness bag slung over her shoulder, to the LIF center’s parking garage where she’d left her minivan, a boxy little green hydro-cell that Priss had once called ‘the most street-legal thing in existence’. After Sylia’s paranoia modifications, though, that wasn’t quite true, what with the tinted windows and the window vibrators and the quantum-encoded satellite uplink and at least a half dozen upgrades she’d probably forgotten about. Still, though, it wasn’t exactly a speed machine like one of Priss’s bikes, but that had never been the point, she thought as she hopped in the driver’s seat and turned the paranoia mods on. She’d bought it to have a little bit of freedom, to be able to move stuff around without relying on an autotaxi, to be one of the few middle-classers who still owned that luxury known as a personal automobile.

Oh! She probably should call Sylia, just to make sure they were still on. She whipped out her phone, a razor-thin slab of computational graphene and nanoscale LED’s, plugged it into her car’s uplink, and pressed a little button on her car door. Her phone’s screen flickered, went black, then a white pixelated image of her Knight Saber helmet appeared on screen, vibrating with the dial tone.

The first time, Sylia didn’t pick up, and this being her Saber phone, Linna didn’t even go to voicemail, just got the sound of the call being dropped followed by the blaring _deetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeet_ of an unconnected line. The second time, Sylia didn’t pick up, and Linna hung up immediately afterwards. The third time, there was the sound of a phone being picked up, followed by the sound of a breath, and Linna cut loose-

“HiiiiiiiiiiisorrybutmytranspondermustaconkedoutandIranafewextraclassesbutI’mstillrarin’togostill feellikeabillionyencouldpunchaBoomerbareknuckledatthispointsoI’mallgoodtogojustcheckingto makesurewe’restillonfortonightIknowPrissisinabadpartoftownandtheyputupsecuritycheckpoints soIcandriveherifthatworksforyoudoesthatworkforyouofcourseitworksforyou”

“Um.”

Oh. _Oh_. That voice, hoarse with the vagaries of adolescence, clearly wasn’t Sylia at all. That was definitely Mackie.

“Oh. Hey Mackie.” Keep it terse. Don’t give the boy any ideas. Priss was dead certain he had a porn stash of them from the changing room, no matter how much Nene tried to deny it.

“Hey Linna. Uh, sorry, but Oneesan’s a little busy right now, and she told me to tell you guys that, uh, we aren’t going out tonight.”

What. _What the heck._

“Did she tell you why?”

“She’s down in the lab doing some tech work. I think she wants to get the new suits up and ready by tomorrow.”

“That’s great, that’s spectacular, but don’t we have a job to do? Do we really not have enough data to go after Nemesis?”

“No, and no. Nene-chan’s checks turned up nothing, and we still haven’t decided on a course of action.” We, as though Mackie had participated in deciding that course of action, which in all honesty he probably hadn’t. He was a sweet kid, bright enough, but no tactical genius.

“So what am I supposed to do? I kinda cleared my calendar for tonight just so we could get the ball rolling. Can I talk to her?”

“Not a chance. She’s basically in a work trance right now.” Then his voice dropped to a whisper: “I think if I interrupted her she’d bite my dick off.”

“Mack-ie…”

“Look, I’m not making this up. Oneesan’s actually _worried_ , I think. And the only way she’s not going to worry so hard she goes crazy is if she has some alone time so she can get all control-freaky on inanimate objects instead of real people. Besides, didn’t you guys say you wanted new hardsuits anyway?”

“That’s really not the point, Mackie. What is the point is that I want to know why we aren’t doing something about the guy in a hardsuit who wants to use the tech to kill human beings-“

“Yakuza, probably guilty of a dozen felonies each-“

“And I want to hear it from Sylia.” Linna let him chew on that, imagining his mental defenses crumbling as he realized for the umpteenth time how terribly infinitesimal he was in her worldview.

“Okay,” he grumbled. “Look, this is as hard as it is on me as it is on you. Oneesan’s been whipping me between her and Doc Raven all day long fiddling with weird stuff even I don’t understand, you know, ‘Mackie! Set the nanofabricator kiln temperature to 1273.5 Kelvin!’, ‘Mackie! Grab me a seventy-kilo canister of neural analogue from the cryochamber downstairs!’ ‘Mackie, do this!’ ‘Mackie, do that!’ and I’m kind of on break right now, so just – have a little bit of faith in the ol’ Mackster, okay? Cut me some slack.”

She didn’t really have a response for that. But silence has many meanings, all in the mind of the beholder, and over the phone Mackie couldn’t exactly tell that Linna’s silence was a _baffled_ silence instead of a _loathsome and resentful_ silence.

“Okay. Okay. Fine. I’ll do it. But you owe me. ONEE-SAN!”

Linna recoiled from the phone in pain; the little dweeb had gotten her again, by not just going down to Sylia’s workshop and giving the phone to her. Like a demolitions expert defusing an Afghan dirty bomb, she brought the phone back to her ear-

“ONEE-SAN, LINNA’S CALLING!” Another voice, muted. “-s but why”

This time she was ready, and kept the phone at a safe distance. “SHE WANTS TO TALK WITH YOU ABOUT NOT GOING OUT TONIGHT!”

Man, when you put it like that, it sounded really petty. “-you tell her what I told you?”

“I DID! BUT SHE WANTS TO HEAR IT FROM YOU!” “ALRIGHT, FINE, BRING IT DOWN!”

Footsteps for a good long minute. A strange hissing sound, like the sound of a snake slowed down by a synthesizer, faded into existence and rose in intensity. Finally, there was the sound of the phone being handed off:

“Hey, Sylia,” Linna said, “What’s going on?”

“Precious little,” she replied. “Working on something. I’m very busy. We’re taking the night off.”

“I get that, but why?”

Sylia sighed audibly. “Look,” she said at last, “I don’t trust my own judgement at this point. Father gave me the hardsuits to combat GENOM and a few other megacorps, no more, no less. This is alien territory, as much for me as it is for you, and I need time to prepare a proper course of action.”

“But we’ve killed before! I mean, Sylia, you were the one who slit Brian J. Mason’s throat.”

“Only after he’d directly exposed himself as an evil man to the city, and the city could only see justice in the killing. We could not retaliate before we had that link, and we do not have that sort of evidence to convict the entire Sleeping Dragon. If we were to engage in the sort of violence Nemesis commits on a regular basis, we would mar our reputation beyond recovery in the eyes of the Japanese public.”

“And the mercenary contracts we use to keep the Sabers afloat,” Linna moaned. “That’s what you’re really worried about, isn’t it?”

“To an extent.”

“But that’s not even what I’m worried about! The ADP can handle that, that’s their job, especially once Mallory starts selling them gear. I’m more worried about Nemesis! We need to get him to stop before he kills half the city!”

She could practically see Sylia put her hand to her forehead, in that highly specific way she’d only seen Sylia do. “And my arguments from last time still stand. We lack the firepower and experience to take on such a man, and even if we did, we lack sufficient reason to do so, especially since Nene’s inquiries bore no fruit. We’ll let Nemesis do his work for tonight, then see where we stand.”

Okay, that was news for her. “Seriously? Nothing?”

“Only that some of the Sleeping Dragon’s rivals seem to be working in tandem against Sato. Beyond that, nothing.”

“Are you crazy?!” she shouted into the phone. “If he’s started a gang war, the whole city’ll be burning by daybreak! That’s reason enough to get him to back down before he kills the people he’s trying to protect!”

“And is that the fault of the other syndicates, or Nemesis directly?”

She gasped. “That’s not the point!”

“It isn’t. I was merely playing devil’s advocate. The point is that I – we cannot afford to take action without a precisely executed plan, especially with the KnightWing out of action. We’ll meet at twelve tomorrow morning. I’ll have something then.”

“Great,” she groaned. “So what am I supposed to do for a whole night?”

“Anything that doesn’t compromise the Knight Sabers’ identity. It’s really not my place to say otherwise. Go out with one of your friends from fitness club, so long as you’ll be in a state where you can meet tomorrow. Now, don’t call me again because I won’t pick up. Goodbye.”

“Wait!” _Click._

Linna turned her phone off, yanked it out of the uplink, and slammed it down into her little dashboard storage compartment. Then she reclined the seat back until it was practically flat, and gazed up at the fuzzy ceiling of her car.

Sylia had evidently forgotten that, because of her ‘other job’, she _had_ no friends at Life Is Fit. Irene was definitely, but Irene had been dead for – holy shit, nearly four years by now – and no one had stepped in to fill her place. No one _could_.

She’d begun to think. What was she without the Knight Sabers? A vapid, shallow girl who had managed to find a little middle-class niche she could hide in? A girl who had put aside her dreams of dancing and day trading and even her childhood fantasies of being a kung-fu master to play at being a vapid, shallow person? If Sylia was to disband the Sabers, where would she go? She had an itch, a sense of justice, a little nerve in the front of her brain which told her _this is wrong_ and _this must be stopped_ , and what would that itch do to her if she had to suppress it like the rest of Megatokyo? Perhaps she’d snap altogether, sink into a life of vice and high crimes, play at being some Yakuza’s girlfriend so Nemesis could have a reason to slit her throat. The idea of it, of cradling some tattooed body as her neck opened up, stuck in her head. She had to do something. She had friends, didn’t she? She had to find someone to keep her from going crazy.

Well, she had one other real friend. She didn’t always get along with her, but it was better than elaborate death fantasies.

The thought of cooling bodies looping in her mind, Linna Yamazaki picked up her phone and dialed Priss’s number.

____________________________________________________________________________

**Hot Legs Nightclub**

**February 11, 2036**

**7:12 pm**

They asked for an early set, just to prove that The Replicants Were Back. They packed the club two hours earlier than she thought they would, because if Nemesis was around, they didn’t want to be the idiot out on the streets just a little too late. They asked for an encore, and then another one. They asked for Priss, the beauty, Priss, the danger, Priss, the rockstar.

And she gave them everything they asked for.

How else could she put it? Losing herself in the dry-ice steam, the writhing of her body, the hypersonic humming of her guitar, like she was a passenger in her own flesh, the rest of the band thralls to her voice, the whole world focused on her song, and her, Priss, a ghost in the shell of Priss the Replicant, who (at least according to her posters) had come from beyond the Tannhauser Gate to capture mankind and to eat their thoughts whole. It was like possession, like transcendence, like a rock n’ roll rapture. She loved every moment of it.

But the fun had come and gone, and she’d done a full set without having to run off inexplicably. It wasn’t as though she worried about that too much – Mallory had been as good as his word on keeping the Hot Legs from booting her out – but it was good to keep in practice, so as not to attract too much attention.

And so now the blonde wig had to come off, and her makeup had to be washed away, and the kinda strippery outfit had to disappear into her closet, and now she was just Priss again. Still beautiful, according to all the men who knew her, but beautiful in a human way, not in a divine-revelation way. Like she’d shed the skin of God. Like the less she sang, the less she mattered.

Well, there was no use getting poetical and/or prophetical about what she did now, not after she’d been doing it for a good five years solid. (And there was another number to remind her that she was getting old, that the quake had happened over a decade ago and that the age of GENOM wasn’t a transition period like Sylia insisted, it was the past and present and future, that Sho’s mother had died four years ago and they’d killed the man responsible but even now she couldn’t say if he really was _dead_ , as though the gods themselves disapproved of giving ol’ Priss Asagiri a single success). More to the point, she had another, armored skin to wear tonight, and she wasn’t getting any closer to it here in her dressing room. She slung her legs off of the counter, let her chair slam back into its regular position, and grabbed her phone. Then she left, told the rest of the band that she’d be back in a bit; they didn’t seem to mind. They knew she had stuff going on outside of her regular job.

She always left her bike, a glossy red ’35 Yamazuki with a 110-horsepower motor and a built in quantum satellite uplink, in the alley right outside the Hot Legs. The alley was a strange place, not strange for the Megatokyo slums but strange in a more general sense, one of those spots where the sun only shone for half the time it was supposed to, slim rays of light bleached out, and where it was always hot and muggy and stank of summer, no matter even if it was the dead of winter. Someone had scrawled “God Hates Us” in old-style kanji just above the Hot Legs sign, right next to the trash bin where the lid had popped off and trash bags piled to twice the bin’s height.

There in the darkness, it all felt wrong, somehow. It had been feeling wrong to her for a while, as though someone had replaced her alleyway with an alleyway somewhere else, had ripped up the asphalt and resurfaced the concrete and then sprayed on a slightly different coat of greenish algae and tacked on different worn-away posters that had melted in the rain. She knew why. It had gone from being her alleyway to Greg Mallory’s Alleyway, just as the Hot Legs had gone from being her Hot Legs to being Greg Mallory’s Hot Legs.

The thing was, she thought, as she yanked out the cord for the uplink, extended the superconductive antenna, plugged her phone in, she was _stuck_. Her career hadn’t nosedived after she’d walked out on EMI records way back in ’34 so much as it had frozen in amber, or maybe formaldehyde. Offers given were dissolved into vapor, terms of contracts tightened like nooses. She’d known, on some level, that she’d be blackballed, but she hadn’t expected it to be that bad.

So the only way forward was the club scene, but that dream had died when Leon had come up to her and told her Hot Legs was under new management, courtesy of Greg Mallory’s boundless charity, under a corporation that was supposed to help out ADP vets, widows, their kids, shit like that. Sure, it was nice that she wasn’t going to be booted out ever again, but now she couldn’t leave, wasn’t sure if she wanted to, she’d have to face Leon and tell him that ADP vets with no arms could suck her dick and that just wasn’t her. Things hadn’t changed since their first meeting – she still hated the cops – but she had her reasons, and those reasons didn’t extend to the families of those clowns. So she’d swallowed her pride and stayed, and the rest of the Replicants were too glad that they had her to complain. But how long could things stay this way? Sooner or later she’d get old, and her audience hated old. She needed to make it big _now_ , so she could make like the Rolling Stones and get ugly and bitter but still draw crowds.

She tapped a button on the undercarriage of her bike, felt her phone flicker, saw the cute little pixelated Knight Saber helmet coalesce into existence. Sylia picked up almost immediately.

“Priss,” she said, in a voice that spoke of great aggravation, “We are not taking action tonight. Just so you know.”

“Wait, what?” Priss replied. “How’d you know I was calling about that?”

“Linna called moments ago with the same question. She thought her bra had malfunctioned or something, it doesn’t matter. You’ve the night off for the time being.”

Well, shit. “Well, shit. I kinda played early just so I wouldn’t have to run out on work, and you’re telling me that was for nothing.”

“I am. Are you going to assail me with a barrage of exclamations regarding how our lack of information doesn’t justify a lack of action, how something must be done, in Linna’s terms? Do I have to play the insult game with you? Tell you what, why don’t you and Linna do something together, have a little girls’ night out while Mommy gets her work done. Play with dolls, see if she has any relationship tips for you and Leon, something like that.”

She said it with such a cool, even tone that Priss didn’t realize she was being insulted for several seconds. Then she had no choice but her default retort:

“Go fuck yourself, Sylia.”

“With pleasure.” _Click_.

It took too much willpower to not crush the phone in her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, yeah, I know, it took me three months to update because I was away from wi-fi for two of them. I wrote most of this in a few weeks, and I've got another chapter primed for upload in a few days. Don't worry, we'll get to an action scene in the next update.
> 
> In the meantime, know that the Type-9 Battlemovers and K-9 Boomers are not mine, but are sourced straight from the Bubblegum Crisis RPG sourcebooks.
> 
> Anyway, that's it. Comments, positive or negative, are always appreciated.


	5. Chapter 24: Into the Underbelly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nemesis fights his way through the Underbelly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bubblegum Crisis Franchise is currently the property of the AIC Rights Holding Company - I own none of the material from the original series, but am using the material in a not-for-profit manner, so it's a-okay to steal their shit. If you seriously think otherwise, you probably wouldn't pass a Voight-Kampff test and also probably are the kind of person who maims small animals for fun.  
> The original fanfiction which this is a continuation of might be said to be the property of one Craig A. Reed Jr., but he hasn't posted anything noteworthy since before Geocities went down, so I'm regarding him as vanished, and his work fit to be grafted onto my own like a human centipede. If Craig's got a problem with that, he should tell me, and I'll bitch and moan for a bit before taking this down.  
> Now, sit back, relax. Grab a drink. Read about dudes blowing robots up and shit.

**2030**

**Amazon Basin – [classified] miles southwest of Caracas**

**Morning**

_ The water is brown, not quite black, with silt, and every few minutes you have to reach up with your suit’s hand and clear your cameras with an idle thumb just so you can see in the near-darkness of the riverbed. The lenses are protected, yes, but the silt washes along with the current and against it like a shit-colored snowstorm, millions of flecks of soil following the river’s little eddies in whirling dervishes, in waves which dump what feels like tons of raw sediment on your lonesome, isolated figure, to the point that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. But orders are orders, and your orders were to retract your supercavitation drives a good klick out of the convoy’s radar range, and to walk on the riverbed the rest of the way – supposed to be stealthier this way. And you have passed what look like underwater minelayer drones here and there, probably rigged to kill anything moving faster than a big fish, so your orders were correct _

_ But God damn it! You’ve been ankle-deep in indescribable muck for nearly an hour now, and your passive LiDAR is no closer to picking up anything on the surface bigger than a school of catfish, nothing barge-sized. They’re supposed to ride low in the water, but even then you’re starting to wonder if the river itself has sabotaged your efforts to sense your target, every laser beam diffused by sand and manure flecks from the ranches upriver before it can penetrate a single damn yard. It’s tempting to just swim up and  _ check _ , but you didn’t become a hardsuit operator by following every stupid impulse in your head. _

_ Certainly, you’d suffered the same steel-belly syndrome as the rest of the greenhorns in your squad, believing that just because you were wearing a suit which multiplied your strength by a factor of eight and could stop 9mm rounds dead on, you were invincible. But you learned quickly enough that a hardsuit is a piece of equipment, same as an Apache or a Bradley, with limits, and you learned to respect those limits. The rest tried to take RPG’s on with headbutts and the like in the sims. That’s why your squaddies got stuck with the boring jobs and you got to keep your hardsuit. _

_ Then again, you don’t advance in the army unless you show a little willingness to innovate. _

_ So you moonwalk. _

_ You fire your jets, set for two-second bursts, and kick out of the ankle-deep muck with as much force as your hardsuit will give in endurance mode, striding downriver, letting the current carry you just a bit before the weight of your hardsuit and its canned air slams you back down into the riverbed again. Again, again you do this, and not once does a drone mine trigger and blow you into bloody chunks. Your power consumption barely flickers, your legs barely feel the strain of leaps that would make any Olympian proud – truly, this is the way to travel. _

_ It’s another ten minutes of doing this before your proximity alarm starts going off. You make one last leap, one last impact into the muck, and look up – but of course you can’t see anything, only that the dark brownness looks slightly darker than it did before. You switch on your overlays, thermal, motion, even your gummed-up LiDAR, desperately trying to see what the suit’s computers already know is there. And the displays oblige: _

_ Five dark shapes crawl across your vision, red-hot with movement, and a dozen other shapes of various sizes follow in their wake. Barges, probably, with fast attack boats in between their wakes. _

_ This is it. This is the convoy you’ve been tracking for a week now, the one route you thought the cartels would never take. This is God-Only-Knows how many goons hiding enough synthcoke to fund a small army, and enough guns to equip it. This is what you’ve been waiting for. _

_ First, you set your power consumption to ‘active’. Then you leap out from the muck, surge your jets, and breach between two barges, screaming ten, twenty, twenty-five feet into the air. Below you a handful of men with oversized AR’s, some with chrome and some without it, and they are all panicked, screaming, gesturing to the one guy near a handful of black glossy cases to open them up and give them their heavy guns for godsakes. _

_ But it’s too late. You are here, moving too fast for them to track. _

_ You are here, and you hit the deck with a resounding _

THWOOM.

**Tokyo Bay**

**February 11, 2036**

**8:33 pm**

“Gavin? Gavin?”

Maria’s voice over the comm shook him out of his reverie. “Nemesis here. I’ve hit the bottom.”

“Yeah, you just went silent there for a bit. We don’t want to have to fish you out of the bay or anything!”

“And I’ll be maintaining radio silence until I breach Point Alpha. In the meantime, get into position and be ready to start jamming on my signal.”

“You sure? You’re not gonna run out of air or anything, right?”

Vicain’s voice, a little reedier than usual. “The Hardsuit was purpose-built for long-term hazardous operations. Of  _ course _ it has enough liquefied atmosphere mixture for him to spend a good eight hours. Granted, we could have just rigged up some gills, ran those through pulmonary implants…”

“Doctor, you should know well enough by now I don’t intend to get chrome unless I absolutely have to. Real Special Forces take pride in keeping their bodies optimized without outside help.”

“Fair enough. Just remember that you’ve got a weakspot on your back and it really shouldn’t get breached.”

“Will do. Nemesis out.”

And then there was silence again, save the low roaring of Tokyo Bay’s waters, and there was darkness again, save the blue-green glare of his HUD. It was peaceful, in a sense. Comforting.

He’d picked up some info from an urbex scuba enthusiast site which had done soundings of the bay after the quake, and picked a relatively uncluttered drop site that was still a good distance from The Underbelly, a simple drone-boat ride with his hardsuit out and back. He’d expected, at the very least, bare seabed, before he ran into anything major.

Yet with LiDAR and night vision on, it was clear that the floor of Tokyo bay was anything but bare. Nemesis couldn’t even moonwalk forward without smashing into a mound of half-buried concrete pilings, the skeleton of a storefront, a dissected ATM. He’d heard whole districts had been shattered, then washed away by the one-two punch of the Second Kanto Quake and the tsunami that had followed it, but it had all seemed distant to the real Megatokyo, which thrummed with life even in its most desolate parts. Now here he was, picking across their remains like a scavenger.

As he passed a downed adscreen, the LCD display now smooth and dark, it occurred to Nemesis for the first time how little he knew the city, how little any of his team knew. He’d read once that the human brain could only hold up to two hundred specific social connections before it started making assumptions and generalizations. Maybe it was like that – maybe you could only understand so much of a megacity before the information just passed through your brain like water through a sieve.

Here, for example, loomed before him something he didn’t understand: The Fault.

Somehow, he could see it even without his enhanced vision, the way the darkness of the seabed suddenly became so much darker. It stretched into the horizon, became the horizon, so that he was looking out at a shear wall of total blackness that he knew had to be only fifty meters or so across but felt as limitless as the ocean itself. There was no other way to describe it but black.

He knew that the Fault had torn the Tokyo region in two, and even now scarred an otherwise rebuilt city. Lonely Planet had told him that it was a suicide hotspot now, like Aokigahara once had been, and the highways were lined with signs begging salarimen to Please Reconsider and Think of Your Family. Gaijin social media accounts were packed with selfies next to the signs, looming large and white in the foreground.

Everything else had been restored, even improved upon by GENOM, save for a few outlying wastelands and slum districts, but every city had those nowadays.Why hadn’t GENOM bothered to fill the Fault?

Sure, submarine laser scans had revealed that it went down almost as deep as the Marianas Trench, but it was practically invisible on the seaside. They would just have to dump a few thousand tons of landfill into it on land, and the problem would go away. That’s what Americans would have done, at least, so why the grim idolization of a big crack in the middle of the city? Why put up the signs? Why remind themselves of what was lost? It all seemed so  _ Japanese _ to him. Why, he could not say.

But he had no time to let his thoughts wander. He leaped out into the darkness, then fired his jets, feeling inertia push slowly push him through the churning waters.

He had a job to do. Four nights, and the Sleeping Dragon would be broken. He had made an oath to wipe out these scum when he’d seen Josie Ng’s maimed body, and by God he would fulfill it.

____________________________________________________________________________

**The Underbelly**

**February 11, 2036**

**8:54 pm**

 

And now, The Underbelly.

They come by barge and by bridge to ramshackle docks smeared across the face of the platform, swarming over rusty sheet metal to pay the Boomer and get in. They don’t care about the way the little half-mountain, a shadow of GENOM tower in shape and form, has been ripped open, scarred and slagged by angry neutrons. Most of them are repeat customers, have been for years, and who cares about a few gaping wounds in the superstructure anyway? They don’t come to the Underbelly for the fuckin’ architecture, or for the lack of Megatokyo’s pulsing neon heartbeat. They come to watch the fights and get high.

They swarm through the doors, slap credchips in the hands of an old heavy industrial Boomer, hope it recognizes them and won’t wade through the crowd to literally throw them out. As far as bouncers go, Ol’ Jiisan is crude, maybe a little too rough, but effective. They writhe like a great serpent down damp hallways, squeeze off into dark side alleys to piss, storm up rickety staircases that were never meant to hold more than ten people at a time, trample over the fallen, push, push, push until they reach the viewing section.

Who are they? They are the superfluous, the hordes of meat that the rebuilt Megatokyo had no use for. Too poor to be sold to, too costly for low-level employment compared to the tireless efficiency of the Boomer, too human for corporate jobs, tired, addicted, desperate to remember what it felt like for their brains to produce endorphins independent of needles and slap patches. They are the criminals who call themselves organized, aimless tribes of angry young men built from birth for violence. There are even a few of them who are  _ employed _ , who have come down here to go slumming, to rub shoulders with poverty and feel the elation of their own security.

But they are all equal, all spectators, in the arena.

It was once a water storage tank, made to augment the invisible systems which kept Tokyo’s taps flowing without interruption, and even with the Yakuza’s ramshackle seating bolted to the sides it’s still clearly meant to be one, a smooth concrete cylinder twice as wide as it is tall.

But The Underbelly is not a place where things are meant to last. Hence the ring of black mold discoloring the concrete just where the waterline used to be, hence the ripped-off ceiling that lets the orangish-black of the Megatokyo night seep through jagged openings, hence the way the whole structure groans,  _ howls _ when anything tougher than an ocean breeze hits it, hence the way the sickly-green fluorescent lights strung up by the Yakuza have begun to break free of their emplacements, and here and there dangle like hung men, hence the way the sound system scrapes and grinds on the nerves with a metallic aftertaste lacing every noise.

The only thing that the passage of time and technology hasn’t chewed up and spit back out like a stray piece of bubblegum is the floor, which is scuffed and pockmarked but tough enough, thick enough to still look out on the whispering ocean almost unaltered, and the filtration membrane. The ‘brane was made to drop into the water, suck it, pump it through to fill up the tank, and despite the energy costs of having it break molecular bonds as it went through, and despite all the salt-scum that had to be collected in massive canisters lining the tank, it worked well enough. But the Yaks haven’t used it in years.

Tonight it’s Perfect Tommy, who has never lost a match in his six-month Ban Ji Quan career, who has arms like industrial accidents and a cybernetic voice box that makes him sound like Jeff Goldblum with smoker’s lungs, versus Iwata Saenori, who has never lost a match in his eight-month Aikido career and wears old-style wooden sandals and a kimono everywhere except the ring. Neither of them have any intention of leaving the ring until the other is crippled or dead, for those are the rules, crippled or dead or worse, no substitutes accepted. Both of them are rigged with the last generation of chrome produced before the bottom dropped out of the recreational cybernetics market around 2030, fast, brutal stuff that almost brings a human up to a Boomer’s level. Almost.

For humans bleed and break and weep and moan, and that’s what the audience is here for. This is a world where pain is spectacle, where watching two Boomers mutely tear each other apart with mechanical precision can never be enough, where the human element is still, against all market forecasts, indispensable. But we are not here to dwell on how the latest McKinsey Institute report remarked on how little remains for humans to do, how a human-free world would see rates of growth that would make all the dead economists cum in their graves. Tonight, we are here to watch men die.

Case in point: Kashiro Yamamoto, professional thug. Thirtysomething, got first-row seats to the 2020 Olympics when his grandmother won a raffle, back when times were good, lost his family in the quake and joined the Yakuza to compensate. His job is the best thing to happen to him: he just patrols the half-submerged corridors of Greenhouse 02, checks gear when needed, waves an AR at jumping shadows when he thinks his superiors are watching. He lives in the Underbelly, sleeps in the mornings when the last of the junkies have been cleared out, eats ramen from the vending machines, dreams of going somewhere else. But where else would he go? So here he is, checking places only he’s ever set foot in, hatchways and access tunnels where pre-Boomer robots were meant to swarm and flicker out of sight with nothing but an assault rifle and a motion detector.

At last he comes to the end of his patrol, where the corridor just sort of droops, bent by some chance superheating from the last particle beam strike, straight into the ocean. He shines his light down there, sees nothing but black on black, waves the motion detector around. Nothing. For a supposedly indestructible citywide crime syndicate, his employers sure can be paranoid. Do they honestly think Nemesis would strike here? Why attack a place filled with enough Boomeroids and cyberpsychos to fill a government rehab center? If he were Nemesis, he’d assume that security had been bumped up pretty much everywhere, which it had, and go for something reasonable, like-

Hold on. His motion detector just beeped. Not long enough to confirm that something was out there moving, but long enough that he had to check. Part of the job. There it is again, a little  _ bleeeeeep _ running sideways on his screen, but all he can see is black on black. Is it a big fish? Probably not - Aqua city’s collapse dumped a whole bunch of toxic rare earths into the bay. If you believe the really cracked-out newsfeeds, they’ve still got fissionable material buried under one of the main reactor towers. Only the little guys can handle that sort of shit, and yet, there it is again! Coming forward, fast now, up, the motion detector screeching, and he raises his rifle-

But it’s too late. He sees the shape of it, black with a deathshead of white in the center, and knows his time is up. He doesn’t even get to scream.

____________________________________________________________________________   

Nemesis wasted no time. He grabbed the guard by his neck, twisted until he heard the telltale sound of cartilage snapping, then tossed the man into the water. Then he switched his atmospheric intake to ‘external’ and began his hunt.

Night vision bathing the world in a day-glo green, he moved along an old access corridor which ringed the auxiliary greenhouse, constantly scanning the darkness ahead of him. It was large, vaulted by machinery, and dripped constantly, reminding him of a medieval monastery. The wireframe Maria had pulled from Sato’s servers was in the corner of his vision, and it suggested that the optimal route would be through a light rail track to the main platform, seven floors up. That way, he’d only be dealing with the greenhouse security on his way up to the penthouse and could bypass the ground level, where security would be heaviest.

After about three minutes without a single sign of Yakuza forces, it became clear that there was no stairway up the pyramidal structure on the outer ring which hadn’t been buried by debris or sheared off by particle beam. He was going to have to go through the center of the platform. Detection was inevitable; hopefully he could make it to the Underbelly’s main platform, then use the charges he’d planted on the auxiliaries’ support pillars as a distraction. He unsheathed his vibrosword and made for a side hatchway he’d passed earlier.

One side corridor later, he emerged into a large, dimly-lit space which definitely resembled a greenhouse, what with the thick layers of hydroponic crops stacked up like an overgrown server farm. An initial scan revealed no more than seven labor Boomers flitting between stacks, tending to the crops in place of human botanists, plus a lone guard armed with only an FN FAL. A second scan identified the plants as _Papaver Somniferum_ _Vulgaris_ , a genetically engineered species of opium poppy designed to resist any defoliants the authorities could throw at it.

_ Sick bastards _ . He normally didn’t enjoy his work, but sinking this greenhouse specifically would feel very, very good. First, though, he had to get past the Boomers.

And in a hardsuit, there was only one way to do that. He clicked on his comm, sent the message to start jamming, and clicked it off.

Nemesis unsheathed his vibrosword, walked up to the nearest Boomer with a spring in his step, and tapped it on the shoulder; it whirled around right as he drove the blade straight into the thing’s chassis, the vibrations ripping gouts of orange circulatory fluid out of its primary cardiac pump. He yanked the blade out, then slammed the Boomer’s face straight into the nearest stack with enough force to knock it over. Alarms began to sound, and he broke into a run for what his map said was supposed to be a cargo elevator. One Boomer saw him, squawked a wordless obscenity and ran at him, gardening shears swinging back and forth, and he just grabbed it by its head and pulled, not even breaking stride. Another came behind him, and he mule-kicked the Boomer in the chest before leaping a good six meters forward, vibrosword out, stabbing into the lone guard as he scrambled for an alarm panel; the thug’s hand stopped just short of it before his body crumpled.

His scanner had the five remaining Boomers converging on him, and no signs of other major threats, but Nemesis had neither the time nor the patience to waste ammunition on the robots. Grasping the track on which the central cargo elevator rested, he sheathed his vibrosword and began to climb, launching himself over and over again with all the strength his suit’s compressed musculature and plasma thrusters could provide. The rail strained under his grip, but he kept going.

____________________________________________________________________________

Senjuku Inoue was watching Perfect Tommy scuffle back and forth with Saenori-san, his preferred bet, from his penthouse media console when the first alarms went off, no more than a blinking light on a side panel but a threat all the same. He raised an eyebrow, then turned to one of his guard Boomers.

“Well,” he said tonelessly, “he is here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Inoue raised his phone and switched the camera feed from ARENA to GREENHOUSE 02. Nemesis was in the process of removing one of his labor Boomer’s heads from its body, but, he noted, wasn’t really putting a lot of effort into it. Evidently slaughtering the biomechanical equivalent of Filipino migrant workers was not difficult for this man.

Well, no surprise there. Anyone could slaughter a smaller labor Boomer with little to no effort, especially someone wearing a hardsuit. And Nemesis certainly had already proven himself to be a relentless threat even in his smaller suit. Overwhelming force at one of The Underbelly’s chokepoints, perhaps the connective tunnel on the seventh floor, would be the most prudent.

He got up and turned to the 55C, which loomed behind his chair a good head taller than the other, smaller 35C’s. Then, with the authority of a man who knew just how in control of the situation he was, he began giving orders. “Get the men from greenhouses oh-one and oh-three out of there, then seal off both of them. Arm the security system for priority-two threats on the external layers, but be discreet, keep the mainland bridge open, and get a strike team of ten men and five security Boomers on rail oh-two-three. We’ll want explosives – give the armory clearance to use the TOW’s and the micromissile launchers. Trigger the Boomerfish and the PDC’s if he tries an aquatic route. Again, be discreet. Move all the  _ Katagi  _ into the inner-layer areas, but do  _ not _ let them know why. We cannot afford panic.”

“Yes, sir,” the Boomer growled. “Should I request backup from command?”

Inoue hated when people tried to second-guess him, and hated when Boomers did it even more, but he had to admit, it had a point. “Tell them we might want to send the 17-B’s as backup, but no more.”

“Yes, sir.” It paused, eyes dilating and expanding. “Unable to send message. Suspect jammer in the area.”

Of course. “Range?”

“Unknown.”

“Well, we’ve got courier avian Boomers for this exact purpose. Send em’ out.”

“Yes, sir.” Another pause. “Carrier pigeons launched.”

“Excellent.” Inoue sat back down, picked up his phone again, and set his camera feed to the cluster just outside the passageway, which was really more of a cargo railway, between greenhouse oh-two and the main platform. His men weren’t there yet, undoubtedly scrambling for their guns and armor, but they’d get there in time, and when they did… well.

Watching that gaijin fucker finally get what was coming to him would be the most satisfying thing he’d ever see. Of that much, he was certain.

____________________________________________________________________________

Nemesis kicked off the cargo elevator rail, landing in a crouch on the greenhouse’s upper deck. It was a bog-standard storage space, a handful of metal crates all loaded onto what looked to be an old light rail system that looped around the greenhouse, then went straight out, connecting the greenhouse and its parent platform. The track was uncovered; outside, he could hear the subaudible rush of Tokyo Bay, even see a smidgen of GENOM Tower’s looming mass.

It was too open. Even if he had the heavy hardsuit, it was an obvious trap, a chokepoint so simple there was no way he was getting through it without Yakuza interference. He was almost relieved when a cluster of armored guards scrambled through the passageway at the other end, taking up combat positions in seconds.

He was less relieved when he saw what they were carrying. Two with heavy TOW missile launchers hefted on their shoulders plus a case of reloads, and three with the honeycombed cylinders characteristic of micromissile launchers. All pointed at him. All very capable of scrapping his armor with one hit.

Nemesis sprinted forward, clearing the first thirty meters in mere seconds, but it wasn’t enough; he was still a good seventy meters distant when the two missile launchers fired in tandem, screaming toward him at supersonic velocities. He didn’t even have room to dodge to the sides, and the micromissiles would finish him if he were to swan-dive straight down. Instinct took over. Without hesitating, he jumped off the side of the bridge, grabbing some exposed piping and swinging himself under it just as the first missile slammed into where he’d been moments before. Even from there, clinging by both hands to old power cabling, the impact was palpable, the shockwave bending the bridge slightly.

The second missile was luckier; its heat-seeking functions kicked in and aimed it straight into the monorail, snapping the bridge in two like a toothpick right behind where Nemesis was holding on. He winced briefly, then sprang into action. He kicked out, then hooked his legs between into the gap between an old coolant pipe and the rail proper, and then let go. The pipe bent, creaked, but held.

His arms free, hanging upside down over the black ocean, he triggered the charges designated on his HUD as GREENHOUSE 1.

There was a brief moment of silence. Then, a muffled  _ THWUMP _ from below, as the RDX charges fired straight into the titanium steel support pillars which kept the greenhouse’s support platform above water. It began to take on water almost immediately, the emergency vacuum bladders meant to keep it afloat having long since shattered, and seconds later the other half of the bridge was descending down past Nemesis with an awful sucking sound.

He could hear shouting from the guards, but his audio compensators, meant to keep him from shattering his own eardrums in the presence of high explosives, were still dialing back. He couldn’t tell if they thought he was dead or if they were just rattled by the loss of several billion yen worth of opioids to the salty depths of the Pacific, but a quick switch to thermal revealed that they’d made the mistake he was hoping for. They had crawled out of their doorway, were moving forward to his last known location.

Which meant their rearguard was unexposed. Perfect.

Nemesis swung his upper body to the piping, unhooked his legs, and scrambled spiderlike under the shattered bridge, occasionally tearing away a cable duct or a coolant pipe with his weight. Then, he clambered back onto the top of the bridge, letting his legs dangle once again, blindly pulling himself up, until he crawled right behind one of the guards with the micromissile launchers.

He grabbed the Yakuza wrestling-style, threw him off screaming into the ocean, then deftly plucked the 250-pound micromissile launcher out of the air before it could follow him, grabbed it one-handed, then swung around to face the remaining guards. They were still turning around, still trying to process that they’d just lost one of their guys and their target had his gun, still wrestling with the heft of their own weapons, when Nemesis opened fire.

A dozen 12mm shaped-charge explosives whistled outward as one, roared as one, punching a litany of half-meter wide holes in the four thugs. Their innards, shattered armor and fractured bones, were blown off into the ocean. He tossed the launcher, now spent, in after them; it bounced off the top of the sinking greenhouse into a mass of bloody seafoam.

Nemesis turned back towards the doorway to the main platform. Another cluster of guards had seemingly sprung out of nowhere, four assault rifles and two 40mm airburst grenade launchers, their laser sights playing over his skull-faced helmet.

He shrugged, bent his knees, and jumped ten meters straight into the air...

____________________________________________________________________________

_ They backpedal, raise their guns, try to form a half circle and shoot you down. Good use of tactics. Reasonable actions. If it was anyone else, say a Boomer with half its sensory array ripped out, it might even work. _

_ You’re better than that. _

_ Your main guns, undersized offshoots of the M60 Browning stapled onto your arms’ framework, roar with unmitigated glee before any of them can even squeeze off a shot. The first handful of shots catch the guy right in front of you in the chest, and he folds in on himself like origami. The others don’t get the same privilege of wasting your ammo, because now you’ve gotten used to the way the guns buckle in your hands, and you just mow them down. One shot, one kill, seven dead. _

_ The barge is mostly flat bottom packed with padlocked shipping crates, and a tower in the front. You scramble up the tower just as the windows shatter and assault rifle fire sputters across the deck. Evidently even the ship’s actual crew are armed. Pathetic. You grab one of them, reaching up from under the window, pulling him through jagged shards of glass and then hurling him down to hit the deck, then throw yourself into the control room. You punch the dead guy’s in the chest, shattering the entirety of his ribcage in a single strike, then fire a five-round burst through him into three others. Which leaves you, alone, in the control room of a barge weighed down with several hundred tons of what you assume are highly illegal substances, but still surrounded by very hostile forces. _

_ Speaking of which. You duck and roll on instinct as an RPG whistles through an open window, just past you, then airbursts near your back just before it can hit anything vital, the blast wave warping the already shattered window frames. You look up, track it, see the clown on the other barge with five different kinds of skingraft on his face alone curse, reload. That he probably had that thing pointed at his comrades just in case they failed, and probably would have killed his own if he had a clean shot, is not lost on you. _

_ But, you think as you bring your guns up to riddle the guy with .50 caliber rounds, that’s the way it’s always been. Your father fought the War on Drugs before it was a real war, and even then the cartels would burn their own stock just in hopes of catching a  _ gringo _ in the firestorm. These guys are even worse: Ex-Venezuelan Army, probably ousted by the Colombian puppet government set up in Caracas, gone from mild socialist to fanatic Post-Maoists in the span of a few months. Savages with state power - take that power away, and they’re savages again. _

_ The RPG man lets go of his weapon just before he crumples and falls in the river, and another guy, who looks at least twenty years younger, grabs it, and begins to reload. You shoot him as well. In fact, for good measure, you just fire for about ten seconds into the side of the other barge and stop when something over starts to burn. No time to check if the barge will survive or not. You’ve got - check the radar here - three more barges to strip of their passengers, plus twelve fast attack boats with probably three men per boat. _

_ With a suit like this? All in a day’s work. _

____________________________________________________________________________

And the flechette grenade bounced once before exploding in a shower of red and silver. Nemesis fired his impact compensator jets for a second, landing directly in the intestines of what had once been one of the grenadiers, before grabbing the dead man’s weapon and unloading it, then jamming the magazine into one of his thigh ammo caches. It never hurt to have a few extra shots, and judging by the security presence he’d already encountered tonight, he was probably going to need it. He needed to get into Inoue’s penthouse  _ fast _ , before the Yakuza decided to start destroying evidence or he got swarmed by Inoue’s forces.

His wireframe highlighted three elevators which wrapped around the water tank and lead up to Inoue’s penthouse. He could make a sprint straight for the elevators from his current location, a loading bay for the now-wrecked monorail, climb the shaft, make his way to the penthouse, gather as much incriminating evidence as possible, blow the support pillars, then get out while the superstructure sank to the bottom of Tokyo Bay. It looked easy enough.

Nemesis broke into a run, setting his power cell’s output to one hundred twenty percent for three minutes. Three minutes, forty miles an hour, the maximum strain his hardsuit’s musculature and endo-exoskeleton could bear before something broke. He almost felt as though he wasn’t in control of his own legs, that he was just a rider on a runaway car. The tunnel whirled by, light strobing like the decorations on a shoddy indoor rollercoaster. Men poured out of connecting corridors, blindly firing in his general direction, and he leaped over them or just plowed straight through.

He hit the elevator hard, vibroblade out, lancing through an unlucky security Boomer who hadn’t even had the chance to raise its laser gun before being impaled. He pulled out, and began to climb the elevator shaft as Yakuza scrambled frantically below him. For once, it seemed as though part of his assault plan was working. He was rising rapidly, the Yakuza thugs couldn’t hit him even if he stood still, and most importantly, he hadn’t involved any of the Underbelly’s numerous civilians in his operation.

Yet, scaling the elevator shaft, as bullets whizzed past him at not-quite-sonic speeds, he couldn’t help but feel as though he was forgetting something. Something big and fast and moving up below him.

He let go, twisted in midair, and fired another flechette grenade at the rapidly approaching elevator, where five Yakuza with sniper rifles lay in wait. They scattered, and the grenade only shredded the innards of two of the men, and the other three fired in quick succession. One round missed entirely, but the second clipped his shoulder plate and the third slammed right into his chest. Nemesis hit the elevator with zero control over his reflexes and enough pain to send most normal people into unconsciousness.

The Yakuza lowered their weapons to his prone form. He remained stock-still, only holding onto consciousness by virtue of his autodoc’s built-in defibrillator running piezoelectric shocks along his nerves. The elevator climbed. They began to approach, poking at him with the barrels of their rifles. “Think he’s dead?” one of the men choked out. “Probably,” said another. “All that fuss and all it took was one well-placed shot. Guess our boy was a real glassjaw all along.”

He could feel the elevator slowing down. Now was his chance. One of the Yakuza, the one who hadn’t spoken, stepped a little too close, his boot swinging in to kick Nemesis in the side. His arm whipped out, catching it, and he squeezed until he felt bone give way. The scream that followed caught the other two just a little off guard, allowing the vigilante to spring forward, tackle one of the men right in the legs, roll him around before they even hit the floor, and finally bring him up as a human shield against the third guy’s sniper. He felt the impact of the .336 round shatter his shield’s ribcage, ping-ponging through vital organs, and threw the now-lifeless body straight at the last sniper, pinning him.

Then, as the elevator doors opened into light, he grabbed all three, even the two living, and threw them through the opening.

It was a cheap psychological warfare trick, meant to whittle down the will of whatever lesser Yakuza were in there. But the moment he did it, the blue swish of a particle beam cannon cut through the air above his head, and Nemesis had no choice but to duck and scramble back into the elevator.

Well, he’d expected he was going to have to fight Boomers. Everything else had been a warmup; now the real work began.

____________________________________________________________________________

For all the pretensions to luxury the word ‘penthouse’ brought with it, Senjuku Inoue’s personal quarters weren’t much to look at, only a large cylinder split by the three cargo elevators that lined it. The floor was concrete, riddled with holes where wiring had been ripped up, then hastily covered with an assortment of rugs that weren’t antique so much as they were antique- _ like _ , hastily aged. One long screen lined the arc of the cylinder opposite him, evidently Inoue’s media console. Right now it was playing a sped-up view of the Megatokyo skyline at night. There was a little interface screen right next to a big brown leather couch facing the console. An interface to the Underbelly’s computer system. Nemesis’s target.

Nemesis knew there were at least three Boomers, two last-generation 35C’s and one 55C as a part of the basic security detail for any of Sato’s men. It was the rest of them, the dozen or so other blobs of heat that his scanners could pick up through the door, that worried him. Tough though his armor was, it couldn’t stand up to multiple particle beams focused in one place, and that meant he couldn’t peak out the door and get concrete positioning data beyond an approximate number of forces. But he couldn’t afford to stay in the elevator, either. It was only a matter of time before someone sent it back down. He was going to have to wing it. That was why he’d brought depleted uranium spikes in place of burst flechettes for his railgun.

Nemesis pulled on the elevator doors, wrenching them just wide enough for him to toss a smoke grenade in. Black smoke vomited from the little contraption’s openings, and he yanked the doors open, ducked, and rolled as a cascade of blue energy slashed through where he’d just been standing. He fired an HE grenade in their general direction before dashing through the cloud, vibroblade springing from its sheath, blindly leaping for something that looked like a Boomer on his thermal vision, and being met by an armored knee that whistled by his face; clearly at least one of the units had decided to move on his position instead of waiting for the smoke to clear. But he could see this one, now, a moving splotch of red and orange in a roiling mass of deep blue, and he ducked under its next strike and slashed across its chest. It stumbled back, barely wounded, then let loose with a flurry of strikes that rang against Nemesis’s armor, until he flicked upward, jammed his sword into the thing’s throat, and pressed down. They dropped as one, just as another white-hot beam split the smoke again. He sheathed his vibroblade, ducked behind a barely visible couch, and fired a railgun spike at the source of the heat, now fading fast into a mass of red and green. It hit, and there was a mechanical grinding noise followed by a rattling of thunderclaps as the Boomer self-destructed.

There was a  _ whooshing  _ noise, and the smoke began to disperse, fading from pitch black to a burnt grey. Someone in the next room over had probably turned on the vents, probably Inoue himself. As his vision became clearer, Nemesis switched from thermal to conventional vision and began to move around the outside of the penthouse, careful to keep the Boomers to his right. Sensors flicking out, he assessed the situation.

It was good news. The two 35C’s and one 55C, true bona fide Combat Boomers, were only backed up by about a dozen modded Fighting Boomers, endoskeletory models with only soft external armor and taser knuckles for protection. Undoubtedly they probably had a few extra tricks among them - these were Yakuza Boomers after all - but practically nothing they could throw at him would be as bad as, say, that Gerlitch he’d encountered last night. Nemesis smirked under his helmet. This looked almost  _ easy _ . Maybe too easy.

One of the fighting Boomers, which looked sort of like Will Ferrell if Will Ferrel had a chainsaw built into his arm, turned, saw him, and motioned with its saw arm. As one, the rest of the Boomers, temporarily disoriented by the smoke, turned, and moved. They were trying to pin him down, engaging in coordinated melee where ballistics had failed.

He wasn’t going to let them get that close.

Nemesis raised his grenade launcher arm, yanked out the airburst clip he’d grabbed earlier from his thigh storage, and jammed it into his external feed, all in the span of about two seconds. The moment the Will Ferrell Boomer got within swiping range with his chainsaw, an oil-spattered monstrosity which barely looked like it wouldn’t jam within the first few seconds of operation, he fired all five 40mm HE grenades point-blank into the approaching swarm.

He could feel the blast wave slam into him even under his armor, pinning him against the penthouse wall. The Boomers didn’t fare much better; the first round ripped through Will Ferrell and another Fighting Boomer, and the second took out another two, lifting them off their feet and flinging them against their comrades, but by the time the next three hit two Fighting Boomers and the 55C had scrambled forward to absorb the explosions; the 55C just soaked up the blast, its regenerating flesh shedding white-hot frag as quickly as it cut across its armor, and the Fighting Boomers each grabbed long objects mounted on their backs and brought them forward.

_ Ballistic shields _ , Nemesis thought, and then the 55C was on him.

He dodged the first blow, a quick, bone-shattering right cross, but he had no room to dodge after that, desperately trying to move to the side only to be hemmed in by the shields, perfectly positioned to take a clawed roundhouse kick straight to the face.

Even under his armor, which buckled just a little bit to take the blow, it  _ hurt _ . He staggered back, raised his arms on instinct, just in time to block an overhead smash from the 55C that would have caved his skull in. As it was, he could practically  _ feel _ his armor warp and microfracture under the sheer force of the Boomer pressing down on him. He pushed; the Boomer pushed back with all the strength its carbon-nanotube musculature provided; his arms bent inward.

He had no choice. He let go, and just as the Boomer wound up to punch his ribcage in, he slapped his forearm control.

The Underbelly  _ howled _ , polysteel and ferrocrete grinding against itself as a series of synchronous explosions ripped through Greenhouses 01 and 03, tearing them loose from the superstructure, obliterating millions of dollars of reinforcement and load-bearing structures in an instant. Invisible shockwaves rippled through the ocean, through the Underbelly itself, hard enough to overwhelm the sensitive pressure sensors on the penthouse Boomers. The 55C, formerly so intent on pulverizing his enemy, staggered back for a moment, righted itself, then refocused, just in time to receive a thruster-powered uppercut that shattered its lower jaw and carried Nemesis up, just barely out of the Boomer’s reach as it staggered back once again.

Nemesis leapt over the swarm of Boomers, but his balance was just a little off and he hit the penthouse floor hard, half-rolling through a glass table and stopping on his back in front of a sofa. He pulled himself to his feet to see the 35C’s rushing him, each holding vibronaginatas in their clawed hands. He fired his railgun, spiking the left 35C through the eye and out its skull, wasn’t fast enough to spike the other 35C, jumped over a naginata swiped that would have cut his legs off, landed on the bladed staff, and walked up it to kick the 35C in the face before it could let go of its weapon. From there, he grabbed the Boomer by the skull and pulled, flipping over it, then mule-kicking the machine in mid-air, propelling himself off its back, firing his jets above the swarm once more. The 55C rose up to meet him on its flightjets, but Nemesis was ready for it this time. At the last second, he cut his thrusters and let himself drop straight into the six remaining fighting Boomers, dropping an HE grenade just below him. The blast wave did almost no damage to any of the remaining six - the ones with the Ballistic shields had figured out how to counter them pretty easily, dashing in and putting them up before any fragments could shred their outer coverings. But the grenade’s blast force  _ wumphed _ out in all directions, propelling the falling Nemesis into the air once again, straight under the still-moving 55C. The combat Boomer was utterly exposed, unable to cut its jets in time before Nemesis unsheathed his vibroblade and, with a spinning strike, cut a smooth, deep gash straight through it. Then, he grabbed it in midair, and swung around, piledriving the machine straight through a glass table and into the concrete floor. Orange circulatory fluid gushed from its wounds; it twitched, but didn’t get up.

The remaining Boomers spread out, surrounding Nemesis as he dropped to the ground in a puddle of 55C innards. The two with the ballistic shields advanced in a pincer movement, moving in perfect synchronization for bulky objects strapped to their thighs. Before either of them could heft their weapons, he made a thruster-assisted jump over their heads, vibroblade whipping around to decapitate both of them in one strike. But he was open, now, and the four remaining Boomers surged forward, attempting a simultaneous tackle. He fired another HE grenade point-blank, and blew them away. In two strikes, he had obliterated a good few million yen worth of hardware. It felt  _ good _ .

Still, he had no time to rest. A quick thermal scan revealed a hot blob just below his feet, probably Inoue in what passed for a panic room. He’d deal with him later, ideally before reinforcements arrived. He walked up to Inoue’s media console, popped open the access ports, and inserted a slim grey needle into one of them. A scroll wheel and a progress bar rezzed into existence on the lower left of his HUD, as Maria’s malware began copying off anything that looked even remotely sensitive and beaming it to his suit. With luck, he’d have enough evidence to convict Sato for Kagemusha in a minute or less, and then he’d just head out the way he came.

That was when the cargo elevator behind him slid open. And that was when Nemesis turned to look into the beady eyes of a BU-12B Battle Boomer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, it's been a month, and I've got another chapter up. I think that's a reasonable schedule, at least for a first-time writer such as myself.
> 
> Anyhow, I finally got to what you all (all two dozen of you) have been waiting for - a FIGHT SCENE! And it's a long one, too, involving lots of explosions and grenades and stabbing people in their vitals. Good times all around, and hopefully in line with the soul of Bubblegum Crisis.


	6. Chapter 25: Ring of Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nemesis gets in various fights; Priss and Linna talk about killing people.

**ADP Headquarters**  
**February 11, 2036**  
**9:02 PM**

The call came at the moment when Daley Wong had been silently hoping it wouldn’t, at the precise second when he allowed himself to entertain the notion of a smidgen of hope that he would have a night off. There was no other way to describe it; he’d been hassling the dispatch operators for hours, to see if something or another was being set on fire, and aside from a report from surveillance mics of a single gunshot being fired somewhere in the labyrinth of the warehouse district, there was nothing. Loud enough to be somewhere in the anti-battlemover range, but he had no intention of sparing more than a patrol for things like that, not tonight. And yet the second he thought to himself that the Fu-Shui was a fluke, Naoko-chan had patrol chopper #047 online screaming bloody murder into her phone. He dashed across the office to the girl, who was patiently explaining to the man on the other end that she needed a coherent explanation, grabbed the phone straight from her hands, and half-shouted into the receiver, “Say again, Oh-Four-Seven?”

“Daley! Thank God! You’re not gonna believe this, but the Underbelly just lost one of its greenhouses! Damn thing’s diving faster’n a submarine on crack!”

Daley strained to the voice coming over the phone, trying to place it. He’d definitely heard the guy before - who was he? Ah, yes, Private Rokemazawa. Nice enough guy, a little quiet, prone to using humor in place of authentic charm. Case in point-

“What the hell does that mean, private?” Daley barked.

“The Underbelly! Someone just blew one of the greenhouses’ support pillars! It’s sinking into the fucking ocean! I don’t know what else to tell you, sir!”

“Okay, okay. Finish your patrol, don’t get any closer, come back ASAP, you know the drill. Daley out.” He passed the phone back to Naoko, and sprinted for deployment.

The first thing he did was try to raise Leon on his phone, but it was just the usual The ADP officer you are attempting to reach is not available at this time, for more information please call - which was troubling enough. Leon had gone out with Anderson to spearhead the first wave of Yakuza arrests while Daley went through the paperwork that would undoubtedly follow them, trying to throw together enough evidence on various personalities in the city who looked suspicious enough that an unwarranted arrest would, in retrospect, look reasonable enough. Suffice to say that the last dregs of his doubt that there was somebody in the evidence lockers who was on the Yakuza take had been all but wiped away.

But where the hell was Leon? He got in the nearest elevator, smashed the Deployment button, and tried his civilian phone number-

_Hi there! This is Leon McNichol. I’m a little busy right now, but if you’ve got red eyes and brown hair I can make the time, so just leave me a message after the beep, babe!_

-Yeah. No. He was going to have to bug him about that later. For now, he had to rustle up three heavily armored Tac Squads and get them moving, or else the situation was going to go out of control _fast_.  
____________________________________________________________________________  
**The Underbelly Penthouse  
February 11, 2036  
9:07 PM**

It was one of those unforeseen downsides of converting an abandoned security center into a luxury apartment; you could never really rely on the amenities of a modern luxury apartment to always be there. Sure, Senjuku Inoue never wanted for freshwater, which was more than half the world’s population could say, and he had food brought to him personally by a series of faceless thugs, but the internet was crap half the time, the shitty old tidal generators meant that he had to deal with brownouts when the weather was nice and pleasant, and worst of all, he had no panic room. There was nowhere he could hide if security failed enough that someone actually got to the elevators. Nowhere nice, at least.

Which was why he was cowering in an uninsulated cable duct under the floor as his Fighting Boomers were being indiscriminately butchered by a madman in a hardsuit. Which was why he’d asked to keep a 12B, just one, in reserve, in case the rest of the Underbelly’s prestigious security forces failed. Sato had not taken to that one lightly. It seemed he was very committed to a mobile strike force of Battle Boomers which could jet across the city wherever Nemesis went, no matter how large or small the target was, no matter that it was that same strategy which had let the Fu-Shui Nightclub fall to their hated enemy.

He had said nothing of the sort at his meeting with the oyabun, of course. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten anything in the first place.

It was a shame he had to lose his penthouse to such a brute, but it was a necessary sacrifice. Aside from him being stuck in a cable duct, with the 12B now present, things were going well.  
____________________________________________________________________  
Things were not going well.

Nemesis barely had room to move away from the console before the 12B’s chaingun opened up and vomited several hundred rounds in a single motion. He didn’t dodge the deluge of lead so much as he scrambled away from the field of fire, and even then he felt his suit rattle as two dozen 12.4mm rounds pinged off his armor or, if they were lucky, cut quick sparking slashes across it. There was a brief pause as the Boomer seemed to admire its work, the console utterly scrapped, his dataneedle feed cut out at 63%, and then it was firing again, punching finger-sized holes in the wall just behind Nemesis as he sprinted around the outside of the cylinder. Then he kicked off of the wall and rolled towards the Boomer just as it fired its explosive railcannon where he’d been only a second ago. It whipcracked over his head and slammed into the opposite wall, and he was only a meter ahead of the shockwave as his scanners picked up the subaudible click as another shell was cycled into the cannon’s chamber. He took his chance; sliding on his knees towards its hulking form, he raised his railgun and fired a barbed depleted uranium spike right where its hammer-shaped head met its body in a rough approximation of a neck.

But the Boomer was fast, faster than expected for a light tank’s worth of armor crammed into two meters of bulk. It twitched just to the side, and instead of decapitating it the spike clipped its right shoulder, the superheated aerosheathe around it blasting away about a quarter of the shoulder’s mass before the spike drilled into the concrete wall. Eyes dilated, the Boomerlooked almost amused.

Nemesis didn’t have time to reload before it hefted its railcannon, using its free arm to support its damaged one, and fired again. He rolled forward, then scrambled on all fours as the deafening shockwave was punctuated by chaingun fire. He blindfired an HE grenade at the Boomer’s legs, followed by a smoke; thankfully, one did not dissipate the other, and the whir of its chaingun died down as it scanned for targets. That gave him time to reassess.

He was close to the Boomer, close enough to see some of its form in the billowing smoke which had enveloped the room again, too close. It was upright, but unsteady, so his little covering maneuver had clearly done some damage. He made a quick scan, aimed where it looked like there was motion, and fired. There was the cracking sound of the projectile breaking the sound barrier, followed by the crunching and squealing of armor and flesh failing to slow it down, and then a sort of thwump as the spike drilled a hole through the Boomer and embedded itself in the far wall. All good sounds for a single shot to make. Nemesis closed in, unsheathing his vibroblade for the final strike. He jabbed into the smoke, hit air, then danced back as the 12B swung its gun arm right into the place where he’d been moments ago. It overextended, shattered exoskeleton allowing just a few more degrees of movement than necessary, then followed up with a strike from its other hand before he could get inside its guard. But now it was poorly balanced, staggering under the weight of its own body, and now Nemesis had an opening. With the smoke beginning to disperse, he leaped onto the back of the Boomer, hooked his legs around its neck, and rammed his vibroblade into the side of its neck. Electricity arced around the blade as he twisted it deeper, the vibrations sawing through the thing’s armored flesh with measured ease, circulatory fluid gushing from the wound in a tangerine spray. He pulled back, and the 12B’s head, sensory hammerhead and all, succumbed to its own weight and fell to the floor.

But the Boomer wasn’t dead yet. It shuddered once, then leapt to its feet, throwing Nemesis off, then swinging its gun arm in a long arc behind it. Chaingun rattling, it followed its arm’s momentum, stumbling around in a circle, firing just above its enemies head, faster, faster, bullets ripping through the screens, through the concrete, through everything, until finally there was the clickclickclick that told the world its weapon was empty. Nemesis watched from a crouch, then got up and prepared to stab the Boomer somewhere that would silence it for good, when it angled its railcannon at the floor and fired

straight

down.

It wasn’t the shockwave that got him this time. It was the way the concrete floor was smooth and even one moment, and an ocean of grey dust the next, cracks spiderwebbing out from the detonation. He sprinted forward just as the Boomer fired again, burying itself in a cloud of debris, and this time the entire floor seemed to shift. He cleared the Boomer’s attack range, whipped his vibroblade up to cut its left arm off, and it fired again, and the floor sagged, then shattered.

Oh, right. What exactly had the penthouse been built on top of? Probably nothing which could take three consecutive HEAP shells moving at around Mach six hitting it without breaking. And what was that built on top of? Probably the big water tank.  
And what was he doing now? Judging by the way light plummeted past him in a tunnel of blurred vision, probably falling right into it.  
____________________________________________________________________  
**Kyushu Place, Apartment 52D  
February 11, 2036  
9:02 PM**

Power on. There are three. More will come.

The first advances, whips out a knife. Dodge the first three swipes, let them stab, overreach, then grab his arm, pull him close, twist it till it breaks, throw him aside.

“ _Some boys hate themselves, spend their whole lives resenting their fathers…_ ”

The next two come in at the same time. Change stances. Silat Melayu, toes turned in. Duck under the first one’s high kick, back away from the other one’s follow-up grab, rise up, fist into number two’s jaw, let them stagger back so you can deal with Number one, who’s shifted into a sweeping kick. Stomp their sweeping leg, pin him to the ground, but don’t forget about the other two, who are already getting up despite discouragement. That’s fine.

“ _Some girls hate their bodies, they stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback…_ ”

Another good kick breaks the guy’s leg, and he dissolves in a blizzard of particle effects. A whirling punch, a total pivot, drives one enemy into the other, or should, but they’re fast, and number two dodges out of the way, circles in again for a grab, and haptics pick up its arms shooting in under your armpits to hold you back-

“ _Sayin’ GOD MAKE ME FAMOUS!-_ ”

“Will you stop that?!” Linna popped off the AR goggles she’d borrowed from the Sabers’ training room, and the world faded back to her apartment, lit through the blinds by the glow of the city outside. Yellow stripes played across Priss’s smirking face as she turned off her phone’s music player.

“ _Gomen_. I thought you wouldn’t notice.”

“Of course I would notice!” Linna huffed. “You blast your music so loud it’s a wonder the landlord hasn’t come up here to give you the business!”

“Hey, this was your idea. I thought we should stop by Sylia’s place, but you said that you didn’t want to have her pitch a bitch fit at us.”

She hmphed. “What I said was I’m worried about her. We were all thrown off balance by Nemesis, especially you-” here she paused in hopes of an agreement, and continued when she did not receive one “-and her. She’s overplanning again, that’s all, and she’s shutting us out because she knows it’s bad for her.”

“Overplanning?” Priss leaned back on the couch. “Who are you to judge Sylia? I never took you for the kind of person who complained about her boss, especially behind her back.”

“Yeah, well,” Linna said, slipping her headset off and walking over to the couch opposite Priss, then sitting down, “I’m not always the person you think I am. Besides, the Sabers are a team, not a hierarchy.”

“Right. Sylia only provides the funding, the technology, the hideout, the mission, the jobs, the salaries, the connections, et cetera. We have absolutely no reason to listen to her except the goodness of our hearts.”

“None of which means she shouldn’t listen to us!”

“There’s a pretty big difference between ‘should’ and ‘will’, Linna.”

“Moouuu,” Linna moaned, rolling her head back. “What’s gotten into you anyway, Priss-chan? Aren’t you the hardened bosozoku who never takes orders from anybody?”

“You’re the one who’s making a big deal out of one little thing-”

“Little! A crazy American’s about to murder half of Megatokyo, Sylia’s trying to ignore the problem right in front of her, and you call it little!”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Priss growled. “This is all about Nemesis again, isn’t it.”

“I don’t see what else it could be about!” Linna all but shrieked.

“Look, I don’t trust Nemesis any more than you do, but there’s nothing we can do about him, okay? Get in his way, he’ll put us down like rabid dogs.”

“So you’re afraid of him?”

“I’m not-” Priss stopped, finger raised to make a point. “Okay, fine. I’m a little scared of the kind of guy who blows people in half with Gerlitch rifles before they can even raise their guns. Is that enough?”

“There’s more to it than that, I think.” Rarely, if ever, did Priss admit she was wrong about her own emotions. Linna had long intended to capitalize on the opportunity to constructively criticize her should she confess her flaws, and now she had no intention of letting this chance pass by. “Mallory came in with helicopter gunships, GENOM has enough firepower to level the city stashed in the Tower, and you’re telling me you’re afraid of just one guy in a hardsuit? That’s not like you at all.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice fading. “Yeah, I guess. I keep looking back at that point where I was trying to get to you guys, and - and he was so fucking close to me, you know? If he hadn’t caught me with a cop before, what would he have seen?” She slouched, seem to shrink by a good meter or two.

“Four years difference and he would have seen a gangster, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, and all he saw was Inspector McNichol’s girlfriend. And he… fuck, I don’t know. I don’t want to let this get to me, but here I am unloading to you of all people. I’m sorry.”

Priss almost never apologized, something Linna knew usually made bad situations worse. Even her the resident money-grubber knew when to back down. If she was really this rattled… well.

“It’s okay. We’re friends, right? You can tell me whatever you want. I won’t judge.”

That earned her a glare. “Yes you will. You’re Linna Yamazaki. Everytime you break it off with another boyfriend, it’s always ‘he needs too much support’ or ‘he’s got mommy issues’ or whatever the fuck. You judge.”

The walls were coming back up. Soon, Priss wouldn’t listen to her at all.

Was it wrong to pry so deeply into her teammate’s life? Linna didn’t think so. Sylia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery shrouded in an enigma, and she knew well enough not to approach her. Nene was transparent in the way only a half-adolescent-half-adult trapped in the doldrums of post-puberty could be. But the more time she spent with Priss, the more she saw that the singer was for the most part a spinning ball of uncut pain. She needed help, the kind of help that she wasn’t going to get left to her own devices. More likely she’d inject a milligram too much of poorly cut heroin into the wrong vein, and that’d be that.

So she did her best to play unpaid therapist to an aspiring rockstar, of all people. If you asked her why, she’d probably say it was because she liked the challenge. But now it looked as though she’d failed again.

Priss looked out toward the window. She cocked her head, like she was listening to something. And then she said something remarkable:

“It’s too easy to kill people, you know.”

Linna paled. “No, I don’t know.”

“Really? I thought all that martial arts stuff you did was about killing people as easily as possible. One-inch punches and all that.”

“They’re called martial Arts for a reason, Priss. They’re meant to be a way of optimizing the body’s motions to better understand yourself. The killing or disabling isn’t the focus most of the time.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. Sylia didn’t hire an instructor to teach you Krav Maga and Panzerkunst for fucking body optimization, she did it so you could play your role in the team better.”

“True. But it keeps me in better shape than you.”

Silence. Priss didn’t even glare at her. She just - looked. Like she was in a museum and Linna was some post-contemporary bronze sculpture.

“Okay,” she said at last, “that would have worked on Nene, but it ain’t gonna work on me. I appreciate the effort, though.” She clapped a few times. “But you’re missing the point.”

“Well what is the point.”

“The point is it’s too easy to kill people. I said it already.” Somehow Linna expected her to be grinding her teeth, but she wasn’t. It dawned on her that somewhere along the line, Priss had started leading this conversation in her place. It wasn’t a good feeling.

“I mean, think about it. Compared to a Boomer, our bodies can’t take shit before they just break down and stop working. Knives and bullets and lasers are so easy to make these days, yet they can all shatter our protective skeleton, tear through our soft tissue, drain us of blood, rip open vital systems, all before we even get the chance to respond. It’s easier to kill a person than it is to stop them from being killed. Has been since the beginning of time.”

“What?” Why was she going on this tangent? “What difference does it make? We don’t go around killing each other randomly, so why does it matter?”

“We don’t? Shit, Linna, where were you when the quake hit? Every part of this city that isn’t company town’s an out-and-out warzone, and it’s been that way for a good ten years now. We fucking kill each other all the goddamn time and it’s - it’s not even skill that keeps people alive, you know? It’s luck. The only reason I’m still here, you’re still here, is ‘cause we’re lucky. We got jobs, we got money, we got houses to hide in when winter comes, but it wasn’t ‘cause we were good. I mean, fuck, I knew a half-dozen people who used to play at the Hot Legs who were better than I was, and they just… disappeared. The whole lot of em’.”

“Are you drunk?”

Priss shrugged. “A little. Not a lot. Anyway, death is bullshit, Nemesis kills people, therefore Nemesis is bullshit. All part of the same thing. Tee Ell Dee Arrrrr.”

Something clicked in the back of Linna’s mind.

She was so, so casual, about taking people and undoing them. The way she described the nation’s biggest natural disaster in recorded history - No.

She was cynical. That meant something. And it was so obvious, so blatant.

So Priss.

“...You’ve killed before, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.”  
____________________________________________________________________  
Nemesis fired his flightjets almost on instinct three seconds from smashing into the transparent floor of the arena, but still didn’t halt his momentum enough to land on his feet. Instead, he tucked, rolled, got to his feet, and looked around.

There were four other bodies in the arena, two living and two dead. A white suit who he assumed must have been Senjuku Inoue was a gory stain on the floor, a smear of blood and shattered bone and something that looked like his large intestine. The 12B hadn’t done much better. Its armor had kept its general shape intact minus its head, but there was so much orange goop spraying out from its neck that Nemesis felt comfortable no longer counting it as a threat. The other two were a pair of cyborgs, beaten and bloody, and they were looking right at him. One, who had part of his cheek torn off to reveal skull plating stained red, growled, and the arena seemed to light up with joy. The spectators cheered, screamed, howled for Perfect Tommy, Perfect Tommy, Perfect Tommy.

He didn’t have time for this. He needed a way out, preferably one that wouldn’t put him so close to an idiot mob. His grenade launcher was almost dry, his railgun wasn’t doing much better, and while he wasn’t expecting backup to come too soon, the ADP would be a problem he wasn’t equipped to deal with either. In retrospect, he should have brought his heavy hardsuit - but then again, the heavy hardsuit would have ripped that connecting rail into little pieces and he would have taken a TOW to the face.

Such was life.

He unsheathed his vibroblade just as the Jeff Goldblum lookalike with no cheek ran at him screaming, then whipped it around to cut through a weakpoint in his skeletal plating right at the hinge of his jaw. The other one, the more Japanese one, rushed him with a flurry of enhanced punches that he brushed aside with his free arm, then drove the blade into the man’s gut. He pulled it out, let his body drop to the floor, and looked up at the crowd. Then he spoke.

“Go. Now.”

They looked at him, and he could see the glimmer of cohesive thought in at least some of their eyes, fear being weighed against anger.

Then anger won out.  
____________________________________________________________________  
“I was thirteen, I think, and there was this drug dealer who was selling DreamTime dataneedles down in Chinatown, where we rode some of the time. It wasn’t exactly our turf, but that was before that pimp asshole Chee took over so I guess you couldn’t say it was Triad turf, either. Anyway, we’re stopping for a recharge when Tetsuo-kun-”

“Tetsuo-kun? Wouldn’t you be younger than him?”

“Yeah, I guess. But he was kind of a scrawny little prick anyway, and I was a good head taller, so yeah, Tetsuo-kun. Anyway, he hears from the lady selling pork rolls that you can buy virtual porn and shit from this guy, and he gets really excited, ‘cause he had an AR headset he’d conned off some mid-class from Nerima. So he goes to the dealer in this old underground mall that somehow hadn’t collapsed, power’s out and everything, real spooky, the sick fuck calls himself Morpheus, was all-” here her finger traced up along her skull “-shaved, here. A big stripe of bald, and red hologram eyes. Had a bit of a lisp.”

“So Tetsuo-kun buys a Fan Bingbing ero dataneedle, a sort of companion thing - you know companions?”

“Those are those AR constructs that are people that only the wearer can see right? Do they still sell those?”

“Probably. Having a trophy wife you could carry with you on the go is a pretty great idea, if you ask me. I never saw her, of course, but Tetsuo-kun was so infatuated with the damn thing he could barely ride back to our hideout. He’d tell us what it was doing, carry on these one-sided conversations with it, about other Shanghollywood starlets he had a thing for, that sort of thing.

“And you never saw it?”

“Of course not. Even when we pried the gogs off of him she just disappeared, locked down the whole headset and refused to come out. We would have had to hire an AI whisperer to get her out, and none of us wanted to spend that kind of yen, so me and Kaneda were all, you know, what the fuck. Plenty of gangs had the one dumbass who was a total junkie but still managed to pull his weight. What was the harm in having a guy like that?”  
____________________________________________________________________  
First came half-empty plastic tea bottles, unfinished styrofoam ramen bowls, harmless debris hurled at Nemesis in a liquid current of illogical rage, signs that no, nobody was going to get out anytime soon. He didn’t flinch, confident in his armor. Inside, he was seething. Did these people not understand what was going to happen to them? No, probably not. His father had made a point of never underestimating the stupidity of the common man, and neither would he. He would proceed with his original plan, and if any civilian idiots got in his way, he would do his best to just cripple them.

Then came the Fighting Boomers.

There were no real entrances into the arena on the floor level, mere centimeters from the raging ocean. There was, however, an elaborate network of pumping stations and smaller tunnels hooked up to the sides of the water tank, which would flip open to drain it and pump its precious cargo into other parts of Aqua City. And it was from those little holes that the Boomers gushed out from, flowing over one another in a sequence of lithe movement to surround him, to crush him with the sheer weight of their bodies.

He rolled to the right, whipped his vibroblade around in a long arc to slash open the first wave, then found his motion cut short. One of the Fighting Boomers, its pectoral fans still half-deployed, had the blade in a death grip, and was twisting, pulling, trying to break it. He pulled back, slipped through its grasp, sheathed the blade before someone else could make a grab for it, and stepped into the waiting arms of another fighter. Before he could even move its arms whistled under his armpits and practically wrenched his arms out of their sockets. Nemesis grunted in pain just as another Boomer rammed its elbow into his chest, his armor flexing with the blow. An alert for potential microfractures on the breastplate popped up on his lower HUD. He blinked, and dismissed it just as the Boomer punched him again.

The third time it approached, he triggered his leg jets and kicked straight up, decapitating the Boomer in another spray of tangerine, brought his leg straight down, then pivoted on his foot, rolling, flipping the Boomer that was holding him straight into another approaching challenger. He completed the roll, got to his feet, and drove his head into the chin of another Boomer. It staggered back, gurgling orange from its mangled jaw, synthetic skin torn off by the force of the impact.

A beer bottle nailed Nemesis in the side of the head. He did not feel it, but it was enough to encourage him to break free of the melee and take in his surroundings.

In seconds, his HUD and 360-degree camera display had told him what he needed to know. There were at least twenty Fighting Boomers in various stages of redress, more than enough to beat him to death. There were still civilians in the stands, mostly out of ammunition or being restrained by security Boomers, a few less than before, but still too many. And there was a remarkable lack of armed Yakuza everywhere he looked.

He turned to a Boomer trying to charge him, sidestepped, then grabbed its outstretched elbow and, overcharging his musculature for a brief moment, flung him across the arena into the concrete wall. The other Boomers didn’t react, slowly circling him again, probably trying to predict his movements. He didn’t know and didn’t care. GENOM didn’t build them smart enough to figure him out.

He jumped over the circle of Boomers, popped his vibroblade, then aimed straight at one Boomer which jumped out to meet him. He inserted and removed the blade from its face in the span of seconds, then kicked off its flailing corpse and slid right behind another Boomer, the tip of his blade trailing in and out and along the length of its spine. The shadow of another loomed over him, and he hopped backwards, firing his boot jets and smashing his elbow into its neck, then stomping one of its legs into the ground. Three rushed him at the same time, and he went low, before coming up for a thruster-powered uppercut which shattered the central Boomer’s skull, then whipped around with his vibroblade to decapitate the other two.  
Nemesis turned around, saw at least ten Boomers getting ready to charge him. Before they could rush him, his grenade launcher coughed out its last flechette grenade point-blank, a garden of silver points blooming before his eyes. He didn’t think, just rushed in the moment his HUD pinged a BLAST RADIUS CLEAR, slivers digging into his armor but never penetrating it, drove his vibroblade into the first dark shape he could find, then slashed to the left, then the right. He pushed forward, and stumbled past the tangle of stunned, shredded bodies into open air.

He’d slaughtered something like five of the Fighting Boomers, which amazed even him. These ones seemed stupider than usual, taking seconds to recover from the blast of shrapnel instead of milliseconds - but then again, they were meant to be solo fighters, unsuited for working in groups the way Combat Boomers were. Obviously the Yakuza hadn’t set up a coordinative hivemind quick enough.

But he wasn’t fooled. The only reason they were even bothering with fighters was to distract him, keep him pinned down so something a bit bigger could arrive. He knew something was coming, he just didn’t know what.

The last handful of Fighting Boomers, all generic musclemen with shredded skin, rallied, charged. He sighed, cracked his hardsuit’s knuckles, and charged back into the fray.  
____________________________________________________________________  
She sighed. “One night I hear this muffled thumping sound coming from his room. I can’t sleep, it’s the middle of the fucking night, it’s raining in sheets, but I can still hear him going thumpthumpthumpthump and I’m all, what the fuck is his problem? At this point I’m young and stupid, and I don’t understand idoru culture, the way people turn these imaginary half-people into fetishes and sacrifice their virginity to shit which can’t love them back, so I go out, run through the rain, past the big open courtyard where they used to have a garden, and I see Tetsuo-kun just - humping.”

“His knees are buckling, his pecker’s poking up, and he’s got a full-blown haptic suit, and he’s humping the air. So obviously he figured out how to unlock the full features of the needle, but what’s bugging me, looking at him, my shadow cast over his jerking features, is that haptic suits cost like sixty thousand yen used. Tetsuo-kun was a dumbass, but he wasn’t enough of a dumbass to spend two months’ worth of food on good sex. So of course I interrupt, ask where he got it from, and he just goes all fucking feral on me. None of your business, why are you up, this and that and privacy rights and shit. I don’t think much of it, ‘cause Tetsuo-kun’s kind of a weird guy anyway. And it’s a really dirty suit, and I’m thinking to myself, where the fuck did he get this thing?”

“Let me guess. He killed someone for it.”

“Exactly. See, I heard from a ‘whisperer in the Fault that they used to put subliminals in direct-neural stuff, have the needle whisper shit in the buyer’s ear while they were sleeping. Harmless stuff. You know, buy the accessories, buy other needles, that sort of thing. But Tetsuo-kun didn’t have that kind of money, and so he got desperate. In the end, we had to tie him down before he tried to hold up a surgeon so he could get AR lenses and a stemplug.”

“Wouldn’t the surgeon just call the police if he had to knock him out?”

“Yeah, Tetsuo-kun wasn’t willing to take anesthetic. Simple as that.”

“But he’d have to get his eye cut open!”

“Yep. We told him that. He wouldn’t listen. Said it’d be worth it. Said he wanted her.”

“Ew.”  
____________________________________________________________________  
He had just finished killing off the first of the stragglers when the 17B’s hit. Too big to squeeze through the pipes, they dropped headfirst from the hole in the tank where the penthouse had been, swooping in on precisely timed jet-firings to surround him in a perfect triangle. As one, they rose to their feet. As one, they aimed their 10mm miniguns at the thicket of scattered Fighting Boomers where even now their target attempted to hide. As one, the crowd roared with the unadulterated glee of predators watching their prey kick and struggle and die. As one, the barrels whirred for milliseconds before the firing mechanisms, as one, kicked in-

Except they didn’t, because Nemesis slapped his forearm control one last time, triggering the last cluster of RDX explosives he’d set up on the Underbelly’s support pillars. There was a roaring sound, so loud it overwhelmed the eardrums and came away as painful silence, and then the floor cracked, caved in, and dropped Nemesis and the 17B’s ten meters into Tokyo Bay.  
Which suited the Battle Boomers just fine. They’d been designed for underwater search-and-destroy missions, after all. This just made killing their target a little easier.  
____________________________________________________________________  
“So Tetsuo-kun’s basically lost his shit at this point. We take the headset away from him, and he’s just thrashing around, keeps trying to bite people, not even hit them. And he bites Kaneda-kun-”

“Again with the -kun’s!”

“You know what Linna? They were my friends. Real friends, not work friends. Just roll with it.”

“Fine.”

“I was getting to the good part anyway.”

“You don’t have to finish, Priss. I’ve heard enough.”

“What, you think I killed Tetsuo-kun? No, I just broke his headset and he killed himself. Jumped out the fucking window I threw the thing out of. Not my fault.”

“That’s…”

“Now, we went back to Morpheus, ‘cause everyone’s righteously pissed. Kaneda-kun brings the one gun we had, a cop revolver he stole from a body in Timex city, the rest of us make do with pipe and snapped-off rebar. We basically armed ourselves with whatever we could find outside the mall.

I don’t know why we didn’t see it coming, but we get there, Morpheus isn’t there, and we don’t split up, ‘cause it’s dark and seedy and we’re not stupid, but before we can do anything he steps out of the darkness with a motherfucking M16 and no backup. So he hams up the creepy pedo drug dealer act, going on and on about how he’s disappointed in us, how he figured us for return customers, how he hates being double-crossed but he needed a bit of security and oh isn’t it just a pity a bunch of forgotten children and and…”

She took a deep breath. “And I just snapped. I grabbed Tetsuo’s gun arm, yanked it up and shot him. Bam. Right in the guts, too.”

“Oh my god.”

“I know, right? That was what he said, too. He was so busy pointing the gun at us, waving it around like it was a goddamn samurai sword, he forgot to actually be ready to shoot us.”

“It was kind of funny, really. He was lying there, kicking, moaning something about shitty kids, being a general whiny bitch, and he just had this little hole, about the size of your thumb, in his stomach. There was this yellow goop burbling out of it mixed with blood, but it was funny, somehow, because I kept thinking to myself, how the hell could this kill a person? One little hole and that’s it? So I walked up to him and I kicked him right in the guts. I never knew a guy could scream like that. I kicked him again, and then something gave in, and he rolled over onto his front, and he just kind of died.”

It was not the first time Linna Yamazaki had absolutely nothing to say in front of Priss. She had the feeling it would not be the last.

“But, you know what? He had it coming. He sold my friend something he knew was bad shit, and he didn’t care. He killed Tetsuo-”

“You killed Tetsuo!” Linna shouted. “You fucking killed two people and you’re just acting like it was nothing!”

“Because it was!” Priss said, pounding the coffee table with her fist. “It was nothing, goddammit! Hell, it was easy! That’s the point I’m trying to make!”

Linna’s hands clenched into fists. “I don’t believe this. You’re making this up just to win an argument.”

“Maybe I am, maybe I ain’t. That’s not the point. The point is-”

“Yes! Okay! People kill other people all the time!” Linna stood up. “But to just accept that as a fact of life is to make the problem even worse! That’s why we have laws, the police, that’s why we have the Knight Sabers!” She pointed at Priss. “We’re not just a mercenary outfit, we’re allies of justice, who save the innocent from the clutches of death! And for you to take the ending of lives so lightheartedly, it’s, it’s sick! You have to stop!”

Priss bristled visibly. “Don’t kid yourself, Linna.” Now she, too, rose. “The Knight Sabers are a mercenary outfit that just doesn’t advertise as wetworkers. But let’s not bullshit around with mahou shoujo catchphrases. Sooner or later, we’re gonna be killing GENOM execs for profit, and then where’ll you be? You gonna pussy out?”

“I don’t have to-”

“I said are you gonna pussy out on me Linna? Because I can call up Sylia and tell her you don’t have what it takeeeurghhh!”

She never finished the sentence, because suddenly Linna’s fist was smashing the air out of her lungs and she went down hacking for breath. The martial artist stepped back, unclenched her fist, clenched it again.

“All I’m saying,” she said at last in a quiet voice, “is that every ruthless Yakuza thug has a family, a mother and a father and maybe siblings or kids or something. And as much as you want to kill the first thing that points a gun at you, we owe it to their families to save them from themselves, and we can’t do that if they’re dead.”

Priss sucked in a breath.

“I’m going to bed. I want to be well-rested for tomorrow's work. Because I actually have a sense of morals, I’m not going to kick you out. You get the couch.”

And then she was gone.  
____________________________________________________________________  
For a sliver of a moment, he was adrift, waves slamming him back and forth, back and forth, dragging him half-assedly in the direction of the shore; then they swallowed him up and he was in the black again. His suit was, despite looking like it was ready for the scrapyard, still intact, still keeping water out and air in, even as he plunged deeper, deeper into the icy water.

It was not the first time he had been terrified beyond rational thought. Once, twice, thrice when his father beat him, but never after that. Once when he’d first had a stream of minigun fire whiz a meter over his head, fighting ISIS remnants in Mosul, and once when he’d watched those same remnants crush his commander’s body with a bulldozer. He’d been afraid countless other times, but for a man like Gavin Belasko, model soldier, terror had been a luxury he could ill afford.

Now, though? Now, he had plenty of good fucking reasons to feel terror. He had five railgun shots left for three custom-built Boomers who were already closing in on him already optimized for fighting in an environment where he and even though his LiDAR overlay wasn’t picking up anything, he could feel them, their sinister, liquid presence flickering through crumbling concrete to hunt out their prey.

He didn’t hit the bottom. Instead, something massive smashed into his side, grabbing him by the torso and dragging his face along the seabed. His railgun arm was still free, though, and he wrenched it in the general direction of his captor and fired. There was a thumping sound, and then he was free, kicking up a cloud of murk before instinct kicked in and he fired his jets, skimming low over the seabed to the rendezvous point he’d agreed on with Maria what felt like lifetimes ago.

Then something detonated in front of him, the shockwave sending him sprawling. He was ready, though, and managed to push himself off the seabed before something else blasted a three-foot gouge right next to him. He rose towards the surface, just slow enough that he wouldn’t get the bends, as another something whooshed by him, leaving a contour trail of bubbles in its wake.

Of course. Out in the open, the 17B’s would just spam their subrocs to take him out. Either he went back to the Underbelly, where there were civilian targets that they might hesitate to fire upon, or he shimmied into the remains of Aqua City and played cat-and-mouse with three hunter-killer type Boomers who had been purpose-built for that sort of thing.

Or he could ask for some help.

“Sarge? Nemesis here. I’ve blown the primary objective, but I’ve got three 17B’s on my tail and I’m running low on ammo. I need ideas, fast.”

“Sarge here.” The voice on the other end was surprisingly clear. “We’re still at point Blackout. You sure the truck can’t shake them?”

“17B’s are usually armed with submarine rocket launchers and loaded with enough shots to crack a bunker.” He flipped a good hundred meters below the water line, then fired his jets, running parallel to the distant seabed. His radar was coming up with the contours of three massive shapes just behind him, or was it four now? “They’ll fire before they breach, take out the truck before they get me. You won’t have time or room to mortar them. I need to shake them before I reach home.”

“If you say so. One second. Maria says she’ll check the bay for anyplace you can lose them.”

“I don’t think that-”

Minigun fire to his left in a sweeping arc, his HUD overlaying it in a flurry of green ballistic trajectory lines. He fired his jets and dove, turning back towards the Underbelly. The water was thick with streams of dirt, clusters of bleached plastic like spirits.  
Three seconds later, the first 17B rose out of the blackness, minigun firing day-glo green streaks of death. Nemesis altered his trajectory slightly, firing his side jets to flip to the side, but not until seven rounds shattered his left shoulder armor completely. Diamene woven underneath the plate strained, stiffened, catching the fifth round and the two that followed in molecular straitjackets, but the damage was done. He wouldn’t be able to use his vibroblade with anything close to his usual dexterity, and with that in mind he dived straight down before the Boomer could follow up.

“Sarge, I need-”

“Maria says the Chiba TransAgricultural Complex usually has a runoff outflow thick enough render most forms of tracking useless. It’s across the bay, but it’s got its own pier, so if we’re quick-”

“You’re telling me to hide myself in water saturated with animal shit?”

Maria’s voice, slightly muted. “Technically most of the meat grown there isn’t actually animals, but big slabs of vatgrown tissue, but yes, they do excrete-”

The Boomer crashed down on top of him, kicking up a cloud of murk, pinning his stiffened arm. He swung his right arm out, hammering at its head carapace. “Save the explanations for later. Will it -argh- get them off of me?”

“It might, but I’m relying on-”

“Good enough.” With that, Nemesis jabbed his railgun, loaded with its third-to-last projectile, right between the eyes of his captor, and fired. It died instantly, orange mist billowing out in the pitch black, then detonated, slamming him against the seafloor one last time, cracking his chestpiece.

He was running out of options. He turned himself right side up, brought up a map of the bay, and blasted off just as another subroc obliterated the storefront where he’d been slammed. His supercavitation drives accelerated him out, down, past a scrubland of overturned pilings, past collapsed buildings smoothed out into mounds with rebar poking out like steel coral, beyond the debris field that had once been called Tokyo, along the smooth floor of an ocean floor untouched by-

Minigun fire lit up the night with streams of bubbles inches to the right of his head. Evidently the two remaining 17B’s were still following him, and if his rear radar display was right, they were faster than him.

Chalk another one up to GENOM’s boundless ingenuity.

More minigun fire, this time over his head. Nemesis spun to the side. He sped up, pushing the supercavitation drives to their limit, then fired his maneuvering jets to drive himself upward, then stopped just below another torrent of fire. He dove down, but the other Boomer had angled its fire to trap him. He spun to the side again, desperately firing his maneuvering thrusters to jet left before they caught him in a cage of bullets, then cut everything as three subrocs whistled by his drifting figure. He started up again, straining against his own suit, but they were closer now, his radar system figured maybe two hundred meters behind him, and that distance was dropping.

But he was rising, now, and the blackness of the ocean was tinged with the yellow of light pollution. One fifty meters. He was still accelerating, straight into a pier perched over the abyss, and he had no idea; would his team make it in time? One twenty five.

The van could go fast, and it could do it legally on a drone-only highway, but how many of those reached all the way to Chiba? Was the Coastal Highway even intact over there? Seventy five. The worst part of it was putting his faith in luck, in God, not his own skills. Fifty. He’d fought his way through the worst hellholes on his planet without ever invoking deities or casting charms, and he didn’t want to start now. He’d seen Las Vegas at high noon, as hot as Death Valley had been at the beginning of the century, and he’d survived that. Twenty-five. If he looked back, turned his head, maybe he could see their dim outlines - but that would just slow him down. He had to rise faster. He was approaching the outflow now, which his thermal overlay of Megatokyo showed as a smear of red set against blue and green, his little yellow arrow approaching it.

Twenty. Seventeen. Eight. They were so close, and the ocean was getting brighter, but it was too late, and then, and then-

And then the world was a blaze of red, and so much - thicker. Like, and he couldn’t believe he was using this metaphor, like he was encased in jello.

Nemesis’s supercavitation drives stalled, then cut out entirely. Something in the turbines was gumming them up. Algae, probably. Red tide was everywhere these days.

Which meant his pursuers were in the same situation. Considering he hadn’t had his spine snapped by cold mechanical hands in the last three seconds, that was the most likely scenario anyway. He wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

He fired his maneuvering jets at full thrust, burning propellant with abandon, and shot up towards the surface. Above the waterline, he could see the CTAC stretch up above the low skyline, and in front of him the algae bloom, fueled by the CTAC’s endless torrent of biowaste, practically glowing red. He looked back for a moment, saw the way the skyline seemed to rise along the waterfront until it peaked in GENOM tower, saw the pillar of smoke rising on the other side of the bay, tried not to think about the people who had thrown ramen boxes at him struggling to get out of the sinking megastructure, and kicked off, freestyling till he reached the loading dock adjacent to the stackfarm megaplex, letting his suit’s musculature do most of the work in place of his exhausted body. The van was already there. They picked him up without a word.

And then he was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, remember when I said I'd try to pump out a chapter every month or so? Well, I'm only nine days over. Oh well.
> 
> In my defense, this wasn't an easy chapter to write. It seemed to expand to fill the space provided in a way the others didn't, but I suppose that's what happens, at least for me, with long action scenes.
> 
> Anyway, Priss's little song is Creature Comfort, by Arcade Fire, which you really should go play for yourself on youtube or something, it's great. It's a very Priss-y song, too.


	7. Chapter 26: After the Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daley and the ADP attempt to rescue survivors from the Underbelly; we find out where Leon's been all this time; Shichiki Sato slaps a robot.

**Formerly The Underbelly  
February 12, 2036  
12:18 am**

“What do you mean we don’t have clearance?

“I mean exactly that, Officer Wong. Handling maritime affairs and disaster recovery is the Coast Guard’s job, not the ADP’s. And they can’t go onto corporate property until we get an emergency meeting of the Diet to give permission.”

“Oh, come on! It’s only, like, a few hundred meters offshore! I could swim onto it, for godsakes! That should still count as under Megatokyo jurisdiction!”

“Well, it isn’t, Officer Wong. You understand that this is a very unexpected situation, and that we need to ensure that any potential disagreements are accounted for before we take action, not after.”

“So, that Diet meeting, is that happening? Like, right now?”

“It’s after midnight. Give it an hour or two and they should be able to pull something together.”

“Well, I’ll just, uh, wait here, then. Tell Leon I said hi if he shows up.”

“I’m giving you twenty minutes to withdraw your equipment, and twenty to return to headquarters. If I don’t see you by then things could get very difficult for both of us, do you understand?”

“Understood. Goodnight, Chief.”

And with that, Daley Wong put the phone back in its cradle, swung his chair over to the command truck’s monitor array, and watched the Underbelly die.

It was a death played out in moments, seconds of catastrophe sandwiched between long stretches of silence, as the megastructure surrendered to the downward pull of gravity and the sucking inevitability of the sea. Emergency flotation bladders burst, tungsteel girders bent and snapped, concrete crumbled away under the weight of even more concrete, and then it was silent until the next little structural failure. VTOL’s wheeled around above its peak, searchlights playing across its outer shell. It reminded Daley of that beached whale he’d seen on vacation in Okinawa, how the animal seemed to deflate, slumping in on itself until it no longer could draw breath.

And he would have been happy to leave it at that. It was another pre-quake relic whose time had come. Hell, no one had batted an eye when GENOM had bought up all of District 3’s public housing, evicted everybody, and leveled the place minutes later. That happened all the time.

Trouble was, no one had cleared out the Underbelly. For every section that died, people died with it. And what could he do? Nothing but watch, unless he wanted to lose his badge and limp back to Jeena Malso and Greg Mallory. Not that that wasn't an appealing idea, but still.

There was an awful tearing noise, loud enough that he could hear it through the walls of the truck, and half of the structure’s right side crashed in onto whatever was left of its floor. VTOL’s swooped down, illuminated the way its face had cracked and warped, ran whispering laser fingers along its side to create a hologram overlay that weaved itself into existence on the monitor to his right. When this was all over, they’d run the various phases of the collapse through a neural net to analyze its anatomy, dissect how and when everything had broken down. From there they could determine the structural weaknesses where the charges had been set, from that the force necessary to violate them, and from that the kind of explosives that had been used, and from that potential sellers Nemesis had bought. RDX, probably, classic controlled-demolitions stuff. GENOM bought so much of it in their urban renewal crusades it would be child’s play to whisk a bit of surplus away from the manufacturer.

All very interesting data. All completely useless. People were dying.

Fuck it. He had to do something, even if it meant he’d be sidelined for the rest of this nightmare. He popped up the audio feeds for the VTOL’s, tapped PEREGRINE_05, picked up the phone, and sucked in a breath.

“Peregrine-oh-five, this is Daley. What’s your status?”

Female on the other end. “Peregrine-oh-five here. Doin’ just fine, sir, just trying not to hit the rest of the flock.” Now came the big question.

“Any signs of survivors?”

“Not really. Thermal’s a mess, so’s sonar, and I can’t send in any drones for LiDAR. I won’t be able to tell unless I get closer, but…”

“In that case, get closer. If you see anybody, hail one of the Albatrosses and start sending folks in for pickup.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think that was cleared…”

“Nonsense. We’re the ADP, we do whatever the fuck we want. There’s a clause in our charter somewhere, I’m sure of it.”

“You want me to bring that up and check it?”

“I want you, Peregrine oh-five, to go in and start saving people like we’re supposed to. Does that make sense?”

A pause. Then: “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know if the brass will like this one, though…”

“Leave the brass to me, Miss…”

“Ashura. Corporal Padma Ashura.”

“Alright, Corporal Ashura. I want you to do your job, and I want you to not lose sleep over this one. That’s my job.”

“Understood. Peregrine oh-five, making the dive.”

On the monitor, one of the smaller one-mans dropped down suddenly, as the heavy VTOL’s continued their looping patrols. Daley’s stomach dropped with it.

He’d redirected all responsibility to himself, as was his habit. So why couldn’t he shake the feeling that he’d fucked up again? Why couldn’t he help but feel that this was a tipping point for, well everything?

Probably because it was. Direct defiance of the chief’s orders? Mass insubordination in a borderline paramilitary organization that was supposed to be under government charter? All to help a whole bunch of people who probably weren’t mostly ethnic Japanese? All in the middle of a gang war that would, given time, set the world’s greatest megacity against itself? All when GENOM was watching, waiting, the urban ecosystem’s apex predator?

Something was going to give. He didn’t want to know what.

What the hell was Leon doing anyway? He’d been off the grid for nearly a day, now. Nevermind the Underbelly, losing the ADP’s good luck charm to some gangbanger would be a blow the city would not recover from. He picked up the phone from its cradle one last time, and dialed a number he knew all too well...  
____________________________________________________________________  
**Pacific Harmony Hotel, Floor B5, District 14  
February 12, 2036  
12:22 am**

_“-Y! M-C-A! It’s fun to stay at the Y! M-C-A! They have everything, for you men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys-”_

It echoed in the dark room the way a lighthouse illuminated the ocean. Leon fished around in his jean's pocket, grabbed the vibrating slate, and brought it to his ear before any of the troopers with him could ask why the hell he had an American disco song for his custom ringtone.

“Moshi-Moshi?”

He knew who it was. “Jesus Leon,” Daley said, “you scared the shit out of me. Where are you?”

“In an abandoned hotel near the Fault. We’ve been sending drones all over the place near here ‘cause Nene thought there’d been activity in some of the abandoned parts of this district, but so far-”

“That’s not what I meant! The Underbelly’s been blown up by Nemesis, for godsakes!”

“Oh,” Leon said, “so that’s what that was. Yeah, me and the Fourth Division kinda had to go radio silent for a bit after something blew up our truck in District Fourteen. Saw the smoke coming off the Bay, and I figured something was up.”

“Thank God,” Daley breathed, “I thought you were dead, or worse.”

Leon sat down cross-legged on the cool concrete floor of the basement and looked around, waved his phone around to light up the room. The three other officers with him, Seldon, Davis, and Watanabe, had all taken their armor off and laid it down by their guns. They were sprawled out on the floor, sleeping, only moving when his dim beam of light swept across their faces. There was only one door, and they’d stacked  
plastic shipping crates against it, in the blind hope that the sweepers would leave them alone and assume the door was blocked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m gonna go with ‘or worse’.”

“Oh fuck. What happened?”

“We got pinned down by cyberpsychos, a pack of at least thirteen with heavy weapons. We’re in the old Pacific Harmony hotel in district fourteen, but I’ve only got three other guys with me. I don’t know where the rest of them are. I think one of the psychos has a transmission interceptor. It’s the only way they could have found us. Look, I really shouldn’t be calling you, okay?”

“I’ll recall the other divisions we sent out for the search and send them your way. Just, uh, hold out as long as you can, and give me the whole lowdown when you get back, alright?”

“Alright.” And then it was dark again.

Leon fumbled around for his Earthshaker, found it still fully loaded. All three shots, which meant he could probably take out at least three cyberpsychos when it was needed - leaving ten more behind them. They’d probably be on him before he’d get a chance to reload.

God, how had things gone so wrong?  
____________________________________________________________________  
**Formerly the Underbelly  
February 12, 2036  
2:24 am**

There were more than thirteen of them, apparently.

Cyberpsychos, Boomeroids, whatever you wanted to call them, were drawn to each other in strange ways, so the legends went. Daley had heard something about how the neural uplinks in Boomer-based cyberware could sense each other, call to each other, group up in parodies of real gangs. Hives, they were called.

The divisions were doing okay against them, not as good as he would have liked. Twelve were badly wounded, two had already died, but the rest of them pushed forward into Pacific Harmony with the chutzpah Daley expected from all his men. His gaze flickered between their helmet feeds as they went from firefight to firefight, breaking open their enemies’ chrome shells with 10mm caseless rounds, and Peregrine-05’s scans, which was going less well.

He was definitely going to put in a good word for Corporal Ashura when he got back, assuming he kept his job. But she wasn’t exactly the bearer of good news: her scans indicated at least a hundred-fifty lifesigns huddled in the last part of the Underbelly that had stayed above water, in the upper parts of the arena cylinder. They had no way to get to them, no way to even carry a hundred fifty people with the heavy aerodynes they had scrambled, and even now the Underbelly was still sinking bit by bit.

They’d managed to find around two thousand people leaving the structure on inflated lifeboats, overcrowded beyond belief, and had arrested the lot on whatever pretense they could find - but the Underbelly could, on average, hold something like twenty thousand people. It probably wasn’t filled up on an average day, but that didn’t change the fact that Daley didn’t know, couldn’t know, how many people they’d already lost. He went back to looking at the ADP feeds.

One squad was trying to bring down a heavily armored ‘roid, almost a Billy Fanward grade motherfucker, that had pinned most of them down with an automatic grenade launcher. The thing, he couldn’t even call it a person anymore, howled in inarticulate rage as rounds slammed into its armor over and over again, driving it back even as it began firing point-blank at its feet before stumbling back into a staircase and tumbling down the stairs, leaving a trail of orangish-red as it fell. Another squad had its night vision jammed by a bald woman with meter-long climbing claws, and he grimaced as she sliced open one trooper’s jugular, and text overlaid the unfortunate man’s feed: LIFE SIGNS TERMINATED, seconds later. The rest of his squad pinned the woman down with minigrenades, then took turns kicking her head into the floor as their night vision came back online, and Daley couldn’t help but pump his fist a little as her skull cracked open.

This was what the AD Police was good at. They’d been trained for shit like this all through the 2020’s, and now they could take down boomeroids and light labor boomers without breaking a sweat. It was only when you factored in the military combat machines walking the streets, the 55C’s and the Jaegers and the Tankmen, that doctrine broke down and the average ADP officer got his ass handed to him separately from the rest of his body. Weapons grew more advanced every year, technology marched on, and now they were behind the curve. It didn’t feel fair.

And now the chief had dealt the coup de grace to their PR by letting that last handful of undesirables die with the Underbelly. No doubt in a few hours GENOM media would be all over how the police had stood idly by while poor people drowned. No doubt in a few hours after that the op-ed pundits of the world would be demanding action. No doubt in a few hours after that the Diet would put the blame on regular officers like him and he’d lose his job and his dignity with it. He couldn’t see any other way.

Ah, well. Somehow Daley just couldn’t summon the resolve to give a shit. Things had been like this ever since they’d kicked out Chief Todo, who actually cared about his men and what he was trying to do, and replaced him with a goddamn advertising exec. They’d been living on borrowed time since early 2034 at least.

He left the feeds running and stepped out of the command trailer for a smoke. The sky above the city was the color of a dead screen, vacant and lifeless, and the minute he thought of that metaphor he cringed visibly. How long had it been since he’d read Gibson, anyways? He looked up, past the ruins of the coastal highway, to the skyscrapers which stretched on in every direction, to GENOM tower which made them all look like ant colonies by comparison. He leaned back, took in the view

It had taken the ancient Egyptians twenty years to build their pyramids, leveraging the might of what had been the world’s greatest civilization to build the final resting place of their Pharaoh. It would not be until for thirty-eight hundred years, when the industrial revolution kicked into high gear, that their size would be matched.  
It had taken GENOM’s Boomers _five_ years to build the Megatokyo tower. GENOM’s pyramids were bigger.

The sight, and its implications, never failed to amaze him. How could one corporation build something so big so effortlessly? What did they use all of that space for? How could you even hope to oppose something so big, so powerful, so inevitable? How did the Knight Sabers survive without this massive beast of a megacorp destroying them? How did they sleep at night?

What were those two darker shapes emerging from midway up its flank, and getting bigger every second?

He watched for a good two minutes, squinting into the darkness, and then he had his answer. They were planes. Bigger than any scramjet, bigger than any cargo aerodyne, just… big. They had big fat cargo bellies and big wide wings and big rows of VTOL turbofans built into each wing.

He threw the door open, scrambled back to the feeds, watched as the two enormous planes decelerated, switched to VTOL mode and began to wheel above the aerodynes. One fired some sort of cable from its cargo bay, which split like a flower stalk as each little head attached itself to the sunken remains of the Underbelly. The other began to slowly drop, its shadow growing over the ocean. Fingers hammering at his keyboard, Daley ran a scan and search on the planes. Kabegumo Megatransports, the computer said, built mostly for medium-range superheavy cargo. Whether said cargo was a platoon of battlemovers or an entire disaster relief effort was of no concern to a Kabegumo. Hell, they could probably fit a few hundred people on the cargo bay floor without any effort.

He watched as the cable, which had to be as thick as his trailer, grew taut, and began to haul a detached piece of the Underbelly’s peak away from the sinking wreckage. At the same time, the other plane dropped half its altitude in seconds and opened its cargo bay. He could see the antlike figures of civilians swarming at a major breach.

The cavalry had arrived. And the cavalry’s name was GENOM.  
____________________________________________________________________  
**Shichiki Sato’s home, District 4  
February 12, 2036  
7:41 am**

“Allow me,” the Oyabun said, “to make something clear.”

“You are some of the world’s most dangerous killers. Men are petrified with fear when they hear that you are coming. They shit their pants when they hear the sounds of your passing. You are the apex predators, the top of the cybernetic food chain. And your opponent was one man - _one man_ \- in women’s clothing.”

“By all accounts, he should be dead. So why is my most prized possession at the bottom of the Bay, and Nemesis still alive!?”

The 17B’s fishlike eyes dilated into great black pits rimmed by red. It made a long grating sound like whimpering.

“Well? Haven’t you anything to say for yourself?”

“Apologies,” the Boomer rasped. “Difficulties were not anticipated. Motive systems were impaired. Sensor feedback was delayed. Many failures in cohesiveness occurred. Loss of one unit-”

 _Smack!_ “Enough!” The 17B flinched, but only a little. “I will not take excuses from any killer, least of all a machine! By attempting to absolve yourself, you bring dishonor upon your product line and the dogs who made you!”

“Apologies. I have failed you, Master.” Its pupils narrowed to pinpricks. “Arming self-destruct.”

Sato’s eyes went wide. “What! No! Don’t you dare self-destruct you shameful machine!” Dammit, why was he chewing out a Boomer? It couldn’t even feel shame; it was just going through the motions in an attempt to obey commands given! “Deactivate your self-destruct immediately! That is an order!”

“Understood.” Its eyes unfocused again. “Great shame. Incredible dishonor. Have pity upon me, Master. On all levels, physiological and psychological, I have failed to live up to the standards set by my makers. I have been given gifts, and arrogantly I have failed to utilize them. I desire naught but the-”

“Shut up. That is an order.”

“Understood.” And with that, Shichiki Sato turned on his heel and stalked out of the garage, leaving the algae-soaked Boomers to the care of his mechanics.

He left via an underground passage back to the rest of his estate, went back to his office, and sat down to review the damage reports one last time. The Underbelly was unsalvageable, despite their best efforts through its shell holding company. Nemesis had clear knowledge of just where to put his RDX to collapse the structural supports, knowledge he had taken great pains to remove from the public record. Now he was left with around seventy billion yen worth of megastructure sitting at the bottom of the bay, not to mention the multimillion-yen opioid growhouses. It was worse than financially unsustainable - it was dishonorable. The crown jewel of his empire, and he had just left it sitting there to be snatched away by a foreigner’s clutching hands.

What would Iwasaki and Smirnovski and all the rest think?

No, he knew exactly what they would think. And he would let them think it, let them see weakness until he was ready to use strength. He could deal with them when Nemesis was good and dead, but he would not underestimate the vigilante again. He had to find him now.

Sato switched his tablet over to reports of the reconnaissance squads, and was similarly disappointed. The reward on Nemesis had been doubled, as per his promise, and between Megatokyo’s mercenary class swarming across the city and his own forces, they’d turned over warehouses, safehouses, flophouses, slaughterhouses, bathhouses, and found nothing. Promises of nonaggression had been violated, things assumed private had been uncovered, protection rates had been raised, and all of it was useless. His Boomers had even covertly scanned a few known GENOM weapons stockpiles, on the theory that the megacorporation had turned against him, and that had nearly ended in disaster. Somehow they’d known about it and sent him a letter advising that ‘our mutual partnership requires the withholding of information on both sides’. What mutual partnership? He’d bought Boomers from one of their divisions that technically didn’t exist. How was that a partnership?

Oh, and to top it off, because he just had to drive himself deeper still into the asshole of his misfortune, he checked the report he’d had his IT guy run on his systems. It wasn’t good; his tactical coordination systems had so many backdoors littered throughout the meat of its programming he could have hacked it himself. If nothing else, he knew how Nemesis had figured out where to plant his explosives. And how long would it take for them to patch the backdoors, the redundancies, the spaghetti code that stained the dignity of his computer? Oh, about a week, and the servers would have to be down for the whole time. He did not have the time or the patience for that, but he couldn’t just keep using compromised servers to store intel knowing that Nemesis would read it. So it was back to the 1980’s, then, back to relying on a platoon of office ladies to manage his finances and personal meetings to keep his lieutenants in line. Back to hiding the records of his illegal deeds in a sealed bunker, instead of just keeping his dirty stuff in airgapped servers in… The Underbelly.

“FUCK!” Sato shouted into the depths of his office. Immediately he heard the guards outside move to open the door. “Don’t bother,” he said, his voice grating. “I’m fine.” His guards were guards, not trained therapists. They did not press the issue and let him be.

He had to think. If he was Nemesis, where would he hide? If he only planned to spend four nights in Megatokyo, where would he stash his armor, his van, every little idiotic toy? How would he get them past the notoriously stringent Japanese customs service? Bribes weren’t enough. He’d have to - have to - ohhhhh.

Something clicked, in the deep recesses of Sato’s mind. Suddenly, everything was clear. Suddenly, everything made sense. He had been subconsciously looking in the wrong place this whole time. But now? Things were going to change

He could not afford delay. He grabbed his rotary phone and dialed Ichitaro.

“Sir, I’m pleased to report that combat reinforcements are currently shoring up-”

“Enough of reinforcements!” Sato barked. “We are going on the offensive. Get half of the remaining 12B’s, link them up with the Goblins, and move as many squads of Yakuza as humanly possible to District 3.”

Ichitaro waited a moment before speaking. “Sir, I do not think it is wise to leave the businesses under our protection to deal with rival gangs with only the 55-C’s. If they bring Anti-Boomer weapons…”

“Let them suffer. I know where Nemesis is. We will deal with him immediately.”

“You found his hideout? But how-”

Sato told him. He could hear Ichitaro’s jaw drop over the line.

“It can’t be…” he muttered.

“But it is, Ichitaro. Process of elimination makes it all so simple. Do you disagree?”

“No, sir, I do not disagree. I have no doubt in your wisdom. But - if we engage there, we’d be going to war against half the city!”

“We have no choice. One way or another, we must make an example of him. Do I make myself clear?”

“Understood.” Ichitaro hung up before Sato could reply.

He smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. It's been four months. If you were following this fanfic and hoping it would update all this time, I'm sorry.
> 
> But! The next chapter is already half complete, so I think I miiiiiight be able to squeeze it out by the end of April. If nothing else, it'll be a bit more exciting and less mopey than this chapter.
> 
> If it takes longer than that, and you're itching for your high-octane BGC fic fix, and you've already read Black Knights and the original Vigilante's Run, may I recommend Bubblegum Disaster by DialNforNinja? It is, I kid you not, one of the greatest works of fiction in the english language. It contains:  
> \- Largo becoming Magneto.  
> \- The Gryphon from Episode 4 becoming possessed by a demon.  
> \- Nene being trained by a ghost of Ranma 1/2.  
> \- Linna becoming Goku, hair and all.  
> I made none of that up. None of it. I can't write fanfic that awesome. Go read it, now.


	8. Chapter 27: Under New Management

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ADP undergoes a renovation; The Knight Sabers regroup and reassess their options.

**Electronics Store, District 5**

**February 12, 2036**

**8:28 am**

 

It was the kind of store that was too cheap to have a real name, that had a tattered LED banner looping advertisements for its services - Boomer repair, Boomer parts converted into cybernetics, even surplus Boomer brains from the Ebisu Mechatronics factory, still fresh in their plastic casing. It had once done old-style electronics, AR goggles and smartphones and the like, until a representative of the local Sleeping Dragon branch visited the store’s manager and politely pointed out how many competing old-style stores there were in the local area. It was inharmonious, the representative said, and it hindered Electronics Store’s ability to pay the necessary protection fees on time, something which the manager was consistently failing to do. With a rate hike due in the next few months, the store had thrown out its oldstyle merchandise, bought some grey-market Boomer modification equipment and a forged license from the same Sleeping Dragon representative on a loan, and that had been that, in a sense. What choice did they have?

So Keiichi Itoh, who had just been looking for a side job to pay his way through a GENOM trade school, was now the cashier for a Yakuza-run Boomer fencing operation. He did his best to not know what the new employees did, tried very hard to look the other way when they came in with some raggedy looking android-type and made short work of it with a plasma saw. It wasn’t his place.

And yet the manager still wasn’t happy with him. The protection fees kept on getting higher, the nice representative with the ponytail and three fingers on his one hand kept on visiting and making suggestions, and the manager just sweated, went red in the face, and said he’d get on it. There was a pretty good chance, the manager said, that he was going to have to go without pay for the next few months, which he… didn’t want to think about. They’d already paid their dues the very day after that Nemesis bastard had shown up in town, so they were safe for the time being.

Which was why, when he saw a man in an ill-fitting leisure suit with three fingers on one hand and sunglasses, but no ponytail, approach the shop entrance, he immediately dashed to the back room, to let the manager know that someone important was coming.

Which was why he didn’t see the man, who was Red Willow, draw a little Russian machine pistol out of his jacket and run a stream of bullets up his back.

Which was why he died instantly, and didn’t get to watch as the man killed his manager, the other employees, and then blew up the shop with a handful of Semtex.

____________________________________________________________________

**District 7**

**February 12, 2036**

**8:32 am**

 

Kazuma Kotaru was a pimp. And he was damn good at it, too, or at least that was what he told himself to sleep at night. It was a managerial job like any other, really. You had your entry-level employees, they did work, you made sure they got paid their due and didn’t whine about it. God, half the time the girls didn’t do real sex; their customers had Boomers for that. It was all about pay-by-the-minute intimacy, heads in laps, the girls stroking sad little hikikomori’s greasy hair, that sort of thing. It wasn’t totally legit, but it was close enough.

But still, being a pimp had its risks. Once or twice a lonely boomeroid had tried to off him so they could run off with a girl, and he’d had to rely on Philip, the old security Boomer he rented out from his Yakuza bosses, to tear them apart very publicly. Gross spectacle like that presented a dilemma to him: it made clear Kazuma Kotaru and the people who put him up were not to be fucked with, but it also meant Philip had to clean up the mess for hours afterward, effectively shutting his little business down. He had a sixth sense for that sort of thing, a pimp’s intuition for when someone was trying to kill him, and it was itching now, bad. But he couldn’t figure out why.

Sure, Nemesis had wrecked the Ja-sia the night before last, but that was a pretty big brothel as far as things went, an obvious target. That skull-faced douchebag wouldn’t go after him, would he? He was just another small business owner under the Sleeping Dragon umbrella, that’s all he was. He was just walking home from the liquor store with a crate of cheap champagne, completely not worth bothering. That was what he told himself, but he walked a little faster anyway.

When he got to the brothel, his pimp sense stopped itching and started burning. He slipped through the open door, found Philip decapitated on the tiled floor, then turned and ran, right into the chrome-plated grip of a snarling cyborg.

“Oh fuck,” he said, and then the ‘borg threw him across the room and killed him.

____________________________________________________________________

**District 13**

**February 12, 2036**

**8:43 am**

 

Once, Chieko Toyoda had it all planned out. She would get up at 5:30, buy a breakfast from the vending machine outside her apartment in District 5, then hail an autotaxi to take her along the coastal highway down to where Yokohama where she worked as a hairdresser, and be there just as the shops opened just before 7. It was pitiably simple, and she knew she could do it, had been doing it for years.

And then, just a few days before Christmas, something involving the Knight Sabers and their American counterparts blew up the entire coastal highway. Now, the autotaxi she took had no direct route through the city, so it had to take an indirect one. Most of the time, the roads would be clear, and her taxi would only reorient itself a few times before finding the optimal route around the Fault and through the ugly sprawl that seemed to reorganize itself daily in the southern part of the city.

And then there were days like this one, where rivers of traffic blocked her from going anywhere in under two hours. She was probably getting fired today, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to care. All she wanted to do was get there, to have something besides traffic happen to her.

Well, whatever. She’d called to let the shop know she was late and everything, but they didn’t pick up, which was odd in and of itself. They pretty much always had a Boomer manning the counter. So she had done what she was supposed to do. She couldn’t do anything but watch the the storefronts inch by and hope the ‘taxi would get on a highway soon. She was going to sleep, because she had been out partying with the girls last night and only gotten four hours of the good stuff. What harm could twenty minutes do?

Chieko leaned her seat back, shut her eyes, and waited for the arrival tone to sound and the door to open…

And jerked awake as something shattered the window right next to her.

The passenger door whirred open. Chieko grabbed her bags and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. She smelled smoke, heard flames crackling, and saw her shop burning.

It wasn’t a small fire, either; it was a flare reaching up into the morning sky, its own funeral pyre. Some rational part of her told her that this wasn’t happening, that no building could burn this high and bright, and then that rational part smelled the mixture of burnt flesh and electronics and then that rational part of her retreated into the same paralyzed fear that had taken the rest of her mind. She didn’t see her boss outside, realized she was probably still inside… which meant someone had set this to kill them.

Chieko heard rumbling behind her. She turned around, saw a blur shaped vaguely like a motorcycle, an arm outstretched, and took a sharpened piece of rebar moving at fifty kilometers an hour to the gut. Momentum spun her around, and then she hit the sidewalk and died.

____________________________________________________________________

And in a penthouse in southern Shinjuku, Jimmy Chee watched his wall, rigged up to a police scanner, refresh, refresh, refresh, seemingly every second a new report, and smiled.

____________________________________________________________________

**ADP Headquarters**

**February 12, 2036**

**9:15 am**

 

“Well,” said Leon, watching the scanner’s reports pile up, “Shit.”

He tried to say more, but the lack of sleep had dulled his thoughts, left him fumbling for words. He took a sip of coffee, which turned into a swig of coffee, and within seconds he’d emptied the whole cup. He still didn’t feel any better, and went back to his office, cup clenched in his hand.

Daley was there, leaning up against his desk and looking beleaguered. Leon looked him up and down. “What?”

“We’ve got a meeting with the Chief.”

“I know that. I was just-”

“No, I mean, right now. I had to haggle him on the phone to get him to delay the meeting up till now, but he’s not gonna have it anymore. C’mon, let’s take the elevator.”

“Mmm.”

They went over to the elevator, one of three glass cylinders locked into the outside of the ADP building. You could see a pretty big section of the city, especially from the upper levels. Leon supposed the idea was to remind officers and staff of what they were doing all this running around after psychotic vigilantes for, to help them harden their resolve in the face of great danger.

Well, it wasn’t working right now, because he could see the city, and he could see the Tower dominating it, but he also saw one or two big plumes of smoke, all with Fire Department VTOL’s hovering around them spraying water. It gave the illusion that the city wasn’t completely out of control.

He knew better, of course. The attacks were scattered, random, varying in violence, but they all had one thing in common: The targets all either paid protection money to the Sleeping Dragon or were owned by them outright. He had no idea when they’d retaliate, or how, but rumors were circulating about battle Boomers, full-blown Tankmen, showing up in strange places, like a Megatokyo version of Mothman, their beady red eyes glistening in darkness.

It was the worst-case scenario, full stop. Civil war, basically. The only way it  _ could _ get worse - no. It was best not to think about that.

“Hey,” Daley said as the elevator began to climb. “You don’t look so good.”

“I don’t feel so good, man. We’re probably about to lose our jobs because of this mess.”

“Huh.” Daley sounded as though he hadn’t considered that. “I mean, I can see why it’d happen to me, but you didn’t disobey any of his orders, so he’s got no pretext.”

“Doesn’t matter. The guy was an advertising exec, remember? When things go bad, corps fire at will just to make it look like they’ve done something. Seniority matters, but not by much, and that guy doesn’t like either of us, so we’re hosed.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t figure anything out regarding Nemesis? You can’t just exaggerate some clue you found, make it look like you’re still worth something?”

“No.” Leon almost glared at Daley, then glared out the window.

“Because you seem angrier than I think you’d be if you hadn’t found anything. You found something, didn’t you?”

“No. But I thought of something.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later.” The elevator doors slid open to reveal the twenty-sixth floor in all its nondescript glory, its staff packed into cubicles arranged to create a hallway of sorts leading down to the chief’s office. As he walked forward, Leon felt every pair of eyes behind him lock onto the back of his neck, their gazes accumulating like sweat. It was, he figured, probably intentional that the chief made things work like this.

And then he was opening the door, holding it open for Daley, and then they were inside. 

There was something strangely empty about the office’s decor. It wasn’t that anything was out of place, there weren’t anime posters tacked on the walls or something like that, and yet what was there all felt cheap, tacky, put there only for the sake of taking up space. The little tropical plant, one of those spliced variants that had gone extinct in the wild a decade ago. The bobblehead of the former prime minister, smiling, something Leon knew the politician almost never did. The paper map of Megatokyo, three years old, probably already obsolete.

And the man himself was as empty and somehow offensive to Leon’s aesthetic sensibilities as the rest of his office. It was fitting, in a way, the way he looked almost but not quite like a dead American president, with the big bulky glasses, the hairline which seemed to recede faster than the Arctic under global warming, the way he wrung his hands with every statement he made.

Like now: “Please. Sit down.” It was like having a cheese grater dragged over his nerves. He did not sit down. Daley did.

The chief looked to Leon, to Daley, then to Leon again. “So,” he said, “we seem to have a problem.”

No.

No.

No.

Fuck no.

His mouth moved faster than his brain.

“A PROBLEM? A FUCKING PROBLEM! THE BIG MAN SAYS WE HAVE A PROBLEM! WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A CITYWIDE GANG WAR THAT MAKES THE BOOMER RIOTS OF ‘34 AND THE CORPWAR OF ‘35 LOOK LIKE FUCKING SMALL POTATOES, LIKE FUCKING SANDBOX SCUFFLES, AND YOU’RE DOING NOTHING, AND YOU SAY WE HAVE A PROBLEM! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! LET US DO OUR JOB FOR GODSAKES!”

Daley cringed. The chief raised an eyebrow. Leon slammed his hand down on the desk, almost as an afterthought, and exhaled.

“Exactly,” the chief said at last. “That’s what I like about you, McNichol. You’re, um, a real straight shooter. Really able to see what’s going on. Yeah.”

Daley scooched his chair closer to the chief’s desk. “I think what my dear friend Leon is trying to say is that you’re being a little vague. Just what is it that is our problem? The impending gang war?”

“Erm. Yes. The gang war. Exactly what I was going to say. It’s a real problem, isn’t it. Could really disrupt the business environment. Redevelopment will stall for sure. We definitely need to do something.”

Leon ground his teeth. “Do you have a plan? Because if not, I’m walking out. For real this time.”

“Relax, Mr. McNichol,” the chief said. “I’m nothing if not receptive to your feedback. We do, in fact, have a plan. Not just to take out Nemesis, not just to end this gang war, but to pacify this unruly city once and for all. Gentlemen, we are going to get  _ tough on crime _ .”

Yeah, that’s what they said about the war on drugs, Leon thought, but kept it to himself. The chief had already taken too many jokes about his resemblance to that particular president from him already. Instead, he sat down and said, “I’m listening.”

“It’s become increasingly clear to me ever since I took the position over from Chief Todo that the AD Police is no longer capable of handling the crises which regularly plague Megatokyo today. I believe this is due to the outdated weapons and strategies  which make up the backbone of ADP doctrine. We currently operate as an enhanced SWAT team more than anything else, relying on riot-suppression tactics and blockades to handle rampaging Boomers. We use assault rifles against armor meant to stop railgun rounds and expect it to work. Meanwhile, the Knight Sabers operate with military-grade hardware in a single four-woman cell with no defined leadership. They are dynamic, entrepreneurial, and they are per person several dozen times more effective than a fully armored ADP Tac Squad. Despite my best efforts to simply have the forces I oversee work more effectively with the already considerable resources they have, we clearly are constrained by old ways of thinking. We need a new kind of police, one which doesn’t suffer the morale problems of our current force.”

“Well, that’s a problem easily solved,” said Leon, sitting down at last. “I put those MALCORP press reports from the Dubai Arms Expo on your desk months ago, and they’re very eager to sell to us. Motoroids, coilguns, the works. You’re telling me you didn’t read those fancy little pamphlets?”

“I didn’t. We’re a Japanese law enforcement organization, not an American one. Any military-grade gear we get must, under the Industrial Espionage Protection Act, be purchased from a Japanese-based supplier. MALCORP may have growing presence in Japan, but Greg Mallory is still an American. Thus, we need to turn closer to home.”

Daley groaned. “So we’re buying new gear from GENOM?”

“Where else would you get the knowledge and gear needed to take down Boomers, but from the manufacturer themselves?” The Chief smiled. Obviously he thought he was being clever. Leon’s stomach dropped. “Their heroic work assisting our rescue efforts put them a notch above MALCORP in my book, at least. In fact, I’ve been thinking about bringing in strategic advisors from their Security Division. We work toward the same goals, so between their know-how and our dynamic, can-do task forces, we’ll be even better equipped to handle the urban warfare which is plaguing our streets.”

Leon’s stomach dropped even further, to metaphysical space outside of the confines of his body. He glanced over to Daley, who appeared unshaken. “I suppose you could think of it that way,” the redhead said. “I just worry that most of the ADP won’t see it like that. After all, it’s GENOM’s devotion to having even the lowliest of labor Boomers being superhumanly tough and strong that has maken routine police work in what is  _ supposed _ to be one of the safest metropolises on the planet akin to active duty in the JDSF, and some more hardened officers who’ve seen their compatriots die in the wake of Boomer crimes might be inclined to pin blame on GENOM. And some of those more hardened officers might be highly influential among the recruit population, and that could be troublesome.”

“Yes,” said the chief, “You’re absolutely right. We’ll have to get rid of them, of course. Can’t have the new doctrine being negatively disrupted.” He looked downward. “Probably better to just automate them, anyway.”

“Excuse me?”

“What I mean is that we’ll have to bring in Boomers to augment the force, maybe even supplement it in those departments with a deficiency of necessary manpower. It’ll help us cut costs, keep the balance sheet look even while we shell out for more advanced equipment. Better to optimize with what we have than beg the city council for a bigger budget.”

“Yeah, god forbid we actually get the money we’ve needed for nearly ten years now-”

“What was that, McNichol?”

“Nothing. Sir.”

“Look, McNichol, we all have to make sacrifices. We need to trim the fat from the ranks, make this operation leaner and meaner, and if that means removing superfluous human labor and replacing it with something that can do the job better, then so be it. We aren’t running a charity, here.”

“In fact,” the chief continued, “I don’t really think you have room to complain, McNichol. The amount of insubordination I’ve gotten from you two would be grounds for firing in any corporate environment, but I recognize that you both have talent this organization needs.”

“Oh,” Daley said. “So we’re not getting fired.”

“Provided you don’t pull another stunt like you did last night, Wong. The last thing I need is more bad publicity strangling our rebranding. If you slip up again…” He drew a finger across his neck.

“Understood. Sir.”

“Well,” he said, “I think that’s about it. We’ll be bringing in GENOM’s head of internal security this afternoon, so, uh, try to be accomodating. She’ll be working with us on redesigning the building’s defenses, so we need to make her feel at home.”

Leon deflated visibly. “Will do. Sir.”

And then they were outside the chief’s office, with the whole floor looking at them. It was very uncomfortable.

They crossed the gauntlet of stares in silence. Only when they finally got to the elevator back down to their floor did Leon finally speak.

“Well,” he said in a strained voice, “that was fucked up.”

Daley shrugged. “Neither of us are getting fired. Considering the situation, I’d say that was the best we could hope for.”

“Really?” Leon growled. “The chief’s gonna turn us into a GENOM puppet so we can’t do anything they don’t like? This is fucked up. This is wrong, Daley.”

“We knew this day was coming. They’ve wanted to make sure we can’t prosecute them for years, they just needed a pretext. I mean, when Chief Todo got the axe the writing was on the wall. I’m amazed it took them this long to pull it off.”

“Yeah, but it still isn’t fair…”

“Was it ever fair? I thought it was you who told me that the city council hasn’t given us the funding we’ve needed ever since Billy went psycho.”

“True.” And now they were at their floor, at their offices, and Leon hoped to leave it at that, but then Daley said, “So what was that thing you were gonna tell me about?”

“I told you, it wasn’t anything.”

He tried to walk off, but then his partner grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “Uh- _ uh _ . If there’s one thing I can’t stand in movies, it’s those asshole action heroes who always growl ‘I work alone’ and then don’t tell anyone about their problems so they can stew in them. You’re better than that, Leon, and you know it. Get it, whatever it is, off your chest, before it consumes you and turns you into an asshole.”

“You sure you want to hear this?”

Daley tightened his grip on his shoulder. “Positive.”

“In that case, step inside.” He gestured towards his office door, and they went in.

“So?”

“So I looked for Nemesis all last night before that ambush, and I didn’t find jack shit. I ran lidar drones down the Fault, mapped out the outer city, probably went further out to the border near Saitama than any ADP officer in the past few years, and still no dice.”

“Because you figured he’d go for some abandoned corner of town like Mallory did?”

“Mallory  _ bought _ that warehouse, as best as I can figure, but yeah, something like that. I was trying to think like Nemesis to find him. But the longer I searched, the less my hunch made sense. He would have known we’d have started searching for him within days of his first attack, would have known that between us and Sato most of the city would be overturned. So he wouldn’t have just picked some random abandoned warehouse and hoped that we wouldn’t find it in four days. Sleeping Dragon’s too big. He would have picked somewhere we would make a point of not going.”

“And that doesn’t rule out the Fault?”

“People are desperate there. He couldn’t trust anyone. So I started thinking, and it occurred to me that it would make the most sense if Nemesis was actually hiding  _ behind _ someone, so to speak.”

“Behind someone?”

“A patron or something like that. I mean, look, the man bought his ammunition local, but he clearly didn’t just buy that hardsuit from Gamble or some other low-life. He would have brought it over  _ from _ America to here, and he would have had to have help getting it past customs, and help stashing it in a city he didn’t know. Then that group, or person, or whatever, would need to serve as a deterrent, a great big hole in Sato’s vision, someone he’d never think to touch. Finally, if push came to shove, they’d need to be someone who’d have Nemesis’s back if Sato did start closing in on his hideout. So: someone well-armed, well-connected, well-funded, and with enough of a beef with Sato to actually take up the job of shielding our man in the first place.”

Comprehension began to dawn on Daley’s face like the slow light of winter. “And there’s nobody in Megatokyo who matches that description besides-”

They said it together. “-Skeeter Karns.”

Daley was silent for a moment, listening to the whir of the fan to his left. Then he spoke:

“So he was leading us on when we met at the Ri-san? I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised, but why tell us to find Nemesis when he’s protecting him?”

“Because,” Leon said confidently, “he doesn’t expect us to suspect him, or at least for us to catch Nemesis, by the time Sato’s dead.”

“Well, that just makes everything even worse. So not only do we have another miniature army ready to jump into the fracas at the slightest provocation, but it’s the motherfucker who made an example of Ronnie Yee by-”

“Yeah yeah yeah. You see why I didn’t want to tell the chief?”

“He’d drive a platoon of K-suits into the heart of his territory and they’d be wrecked within thirty minutes.” Daley hung his head. “And Sato’s probably figured this out by now. So no matter what we do this war’s going to get even more complicated. We’re powerless.”

Leon shrugged. “I don’t know about that. We’re not gonna get anything done normally, that’s for sure, but if we do a little freelancing, something could come up.”

Daley perked up. “Like what? The bad parts of the city are gonna be a virtual war zone in a few hours. We can’t just go up to the Ri-san and go ‘excuse me, could we meet with a certain armored vigilante you’ve been harboring’, especially since all either of us have is circumstantial evidence.”

Leon frowned. “Well…”

“Oh no. No no no. Under no circumstances do I want to get on that man’s bad side, okay? That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Daley, we may not have a choice. Either we stay quiet and let GENOM turn this city into a police state-”

“You think that’s what they’ll do?”

“I know that’s what they’ll do. They’ve got the pretext to put tanks in the streets, don’t they? And then they can just… do whatever it takes to bring investors back. Like Chile in the 70’s. If anyone complains, tries to organize, they’ll have combat Boomers in the streets to shoot them.”

“Yeah. Okay. I see what you’re saying. I got it. Doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to see you throw your life, or mine, away just to prove Karns is working with Nemesis. We go into District 3 without official clearance or heavy equipment, we’ll lose our jobs at the least, and our lives at the most.”

Leon sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “We can’t go in there without help.”

“Yeah, and it makes no sense either way. Skeeter’s all about protecting his people, so he wouldn’t expose the city to something like Nemesis unless he was absolutely certain he wouldn’t be caught in the crossfire hold on did you just say without help?”

“I did.” There was a twinkle in his eye now, a glimmer of hope almost entirely alien to the past few days. “What say we lean on MALCORP a little?”

____________________________________________________________________

**Sylia’s Apartment**

**February 12, 2036**

**12:07 am**

 

Priss tried, and failed, to sleep on Linna’s couch for about an hour before leaving the apartment in the middle of the night and biking back to her uninsulated trailer. It was colder there, the winds of winter ripping along the Fault and up into her little vacant lot, but no way in hell was she sleeping in the apartment of a woman who had punched her in the gut over an ideological disagreement. The morning after would have just been too awkward.

She and Linna had never really fought like that before, but then again she hadn’t expected the most mercenary of the Sabers to be so… idealistic when it came to human life. Linna had always been in it for the money and the chance to train her martial arts skills, always whining about how this job or that Boomer rampage wasn’t actually bringing anything in. Which was understandable, but even Priss knew that if the Knight Sabers were supposed to be mere mercenaries, then they weren’t cut out for the job. A bunch of civilians with minimal combat training and day jobs who were fitted into some of the most advanced combat hardware on the planet, painted gaudy colors that actually stood out against the murky backgrounds of the urban jungle? Mercenaries who had a fucking code of ethics? Who were supposed to ‘protect peace and justice, and rid the world of evil’? Please. In the long run, the Knight Sabers were a loss-taking venture, had been designed that way from day one. Sylia had told her as much five years ago, and Linna didn’t get that.

Or did she? This new, justice oriented-side of her teammate was something Priss had never seen before, and it bothered her. She didn’t know much about Linna’s past, hadn’t really bothered to dig deep into it, and in turn Linna had only asked a few really prying questions about what happened to her. So where had it come from, this desire to save the lives of a bunch of armed thugs? She couldn’t say.

And now she was back on a different couch, Nene knocking back swigs of hot chocolate next to her (she was taking an extended lunch break, but had heard rumblings from Leon and Daley about some sort of massive restructuring), Linna perched opposite the two, and Sylia just standing there, waiting for her moment to speak. They didn’t look like the tight-knit team of superheroes they were supposed to be in urban legend. Priss sure as hell didn’t feel like it, either.

“Now that we are all assembled,” Sylia said at last, “It is time to review our situation. We have a gang war which threatens to tear Megatokyo apart, a rogue vigilante using similar technology to our hardsuits to hasten the desecration of this city’s old balance of power, and a police force unable to deal with either of these threats.”

Nene pouted.

“The trouble is that a gang war, once started, is not easily stopped. Sato perceives control of Megatokyo’s underworld as his birthright, despite much of his power having been won in the vacuum that occurred after the quake. Any concession of influence to his enemies is a personal failure on his part, and so he will war with his rivals until they are destroyed or until he is killed. He will not push for a return to the status quo, now knowing that it is a position of weakness. Further, we have no reason to believe the alliance of rival gangs will submit quietly should Sato gain the upper hand once again. They have been cut out of this city’s extremely profitable criminal markets, forced to rely on support from other branches of their respective syndicates, and they will undoubtedly view a peace offering, no matter how favorable, as a failure. Nemesis may have started this war, but his elimination will not end it. There is a power vacuum now, girls, and every gang in the city wants to fill it.”

“Except Skeeter Karns,” Priss said.

“Actually, Nene tells me that she heard from a bug in Inspector McNichol’s office that Karns is probably working with Nemesis, and Fargo has given me no reason to doubt that. I have shipping records and camera feeds from Pier 109 which indicate two hardsuit-sized cryocoffins were moved off of a Korean tanker which was supposed to be only carrying Chinese-made sportswear. It was fast-tracked through inspections after an order from the harbormaster to smooth things along, according to an informant’s report. And, of course, the harbormaster is a longtime resident of District 3.”

“So he’s in Karns’ pocket.”

“Most likely. He’s managed to avoid external review for quite some time, despite having expedited several shipments of metallic-object printers with the capacity to manufacture firearms. That indicates someone is keeping him safe if nothing else. Unfortunately, while we have the shipping manifest of the tanker, the crew manifest was corrupted days after its arrival. Whether or not Nemesis or his allies were on the ship is unknown, and I suspect Fleet Hermes has something to do with that. Nene has not had the luxury of confirming my suspicions, though.”

“So what  _ has _ she come up with?” Priss grinned. “Not a lot, huh?”

“That Nemesis was most likely involved in a US military operation codenamed Templar. I’ve asked Fargo to reach out to Mallory, since he has several high-level contacts in the Pentagon, and I hope he will provide us with an unedited personnel list. In the meantime, Nene has been attempting to contact Fleet Hermes, who I suspect will be a goldmine of potential information.”

“Yeah, about that,” Nene said, leaning forward. “Why are we doing all this? You said we wouldn’t take action until we had new intel, but now we do, so what exactly is the plan?”

“Why, to deduce Nemesis’s secret identity, of course.”

Priss grabbed the couch as best as she could, and swung around to glare at Sylia.

“I’m sorry, did you just say you want to deduce the identity of a guy who explicitly told us to fuck off and stay out of the way? A guy who even you admit is better trained and armed than all of us put together? A guy who probably doesn’t even have a fucking ‘secret identity’” - here she highlighted the phrase with raised fingers - “because he spends all his time either in a hardsuit or in a bunker somewhere eating canned beans? Do you have a death wish or something?” she half-shouted.

Sylia was unmoved. “Not quite,” she said. “And I believe your assessment of Nemesis is inaccurate, tainted by fear-”

“I ain’t scared!” Priss hissed. “Okay, maybe a little, but it’s a pretty fucking reasonable fear to be afraid of a guy who can pull landmines and other exotic heavy munitions out of his ass anytime he wants!”

“ _ As I was saying _ , records of Nemesis’s strikes indicate that he is not as deranged as you make him out to be-”

“Oh fuck off. Anyone in the hardsuited crime-fighting business has to be a little unhinged, or else they’d-”

_ “PRISS.” _ Sylia’s stare could have cut steel.

“Okay, okay. So he’s not crazy, he’s-”

“Dedicated. Honorable, in his own way, dedicated to minimizing civilian involvement in his strikes while maximizing criminal casualties. This is why I believe he will not come after us if we approach him in a more reasonable way.”

“More reasonable?” asked Linna.

“If I approach him in an environment where we are both outside of our hardsuits, I believe he will listen to my offer. In essence, I would like to pull a Greg Mallory on him, if you will.” She smiled. Clearly she thought she was being funny.

“And a Greg Mallory means?”

“In essence, I want Nemesis to cooperate with us. Or rather, I want to cooperate with him.”

Silence. Linna stuttered incoherently. Priss gasped.

“But - but but but cooperate with him?! As in, start killing people left and right?”

“I know it seems hasty, but hear me out.” Sylia’s eyes drifted upward, and her posture shifted slightly.

“We have passed the point of no return, girls. This war will either tear Megatokyo apart or force GENOM to intervene in a tanks-on-the-streets fashion. The sooner Megatokyo’s underworld is immobilized, unable to fight itself, the better. That means not only that Shichiki Sato must die as soon as possible, it means that his rivals must go with him.”

“I suspect Nemesis understands this. We know he is competent at tactical combat at the most, and he probably isn’t some sort of idiot savant. He will find himself forced to not only destroy the Sleeping Dragon in his usual four nights, but to continue attacking the Triads, the Red Willow, the Russians, the Koreans, and so on and so forth. And the sooner he completes his mission, the fewer people die. But if he slips up, he’s wounded or even dead, and the war continues until GENOM puts its own 12B’s on the streets. And GENOM is the greater evil here, make no mistake.”

“So we’ll help his team out. We’ll expedite intelligence gathering, hunt down heavier targets in our motoslaves, just generally streamline the whole process. Then he can leave, and human blood on our hands notwithstanding we can go back to fighting GENOM and the rest of the megacorporations. We have no choice.”

“That’s all,” Sylia said at last. “That’s my logic. Feel free to complain, but I can see no faults with it.”

No one, not even Linna, said anything. Nene sipped her chocolate, the sugary drink trickling past her lips and down her gullet. Priss looked downward.

Then Nene, of all people, spoke in a soft voice.

“Um, I mean, I think that’s okay, but…” she trailed off. “I think I might have a better idea?”

Sylia’s gaze locked onto Nene. “Well, then, let’s hear it.”

The redhead sucked in a breath. “Okay, so, uh, Nemesis always makes a point of sending a whole bunch of evidence to the police right before he goes for his killing blow, as I like to call it. He sends it, it’s enough to convict a whole bunch of people, but by then it’s irrelevant because most of the heads of whatever organization he’s after are dead anyway. Honestly, he might as well not send it at all, for all the good it does.” She breathed. “So why don’t we change that? Get enough evidence to convict Sato off of his system, maybe steal some from Nemesis if we have to, and send all of it to the police, so they can convict Sato before he gets his brains splattered on his bedroom wall. The bad guys are rendered harmless, the N-Police gets their dignity back, the other gangsters know to back off so they don’t meet the same fate. Everyone’s happy.”

“Except Nemesis,” Priss quipped.

“Yeah, but who gives a shit? He’s the one going around killing people like it’s going out of style. Under Japanese law he’s as much of a criminal as Sato is.”

“And so are we, remember?” Sylia said. “Surely you haven’t forgotten the Asahi Shimbun front page where we were described as terrorists seventeen separate times. I counted that very precisely.”

Nene hesitated. Priss saw an opening. “Yeah, and what makes you think the police are even going to do anything about Sato if they get all that evidence? What makes you think they  _ can  _ do anything if he doesn’t go quietly? They’ll be calling in the JSDF the minute their K-suits can’t handle real Combat Boomers.”

“So you’re taking Sylia’s side now?” Nene said, turning back to face her.

“I’m not on anybody’s side! I just want to not die. All I’m saying is that we’ve never relied on the Normal Police or the AD Police for help before, and this is a terrible time to start. They’re both corrupt, they’re both underarmed, they’ll both just expedite GENOM control.”

Nene’s eyes narrowed. “First off, you have a death wish and everyone knows it, so I don’t believe you. Second, you can complain about the N-Police all you like, but the ADP are the ones who clean up all the minor Boomer rampages, the ones with berserk Mannequins and Labors, so don’t talk shit about them, especially to an actual cop.”

Priss rolled her eyes. “Leon’s a cop, you’re a desk jockey. I can tell the difference. And you only joined the police ‘cause Sylia told you to. So don’t give me this high-and-mighty bullshit. You’re a Knight Saber first, desk jockey second.”

Linna jumped in. “Whichever one she is, neither the Knight Sabers nor the ADP are indiscriminate killers. So we don’t need to argue about this, do we?”

“What’re you talking about? The cops kill people all the time. They don’t need shit for justification, or did you forget about the Little Manila riots? ‘Cause I sure didn’t.”

“I’m not going to argue every bit of history with you, Priss. You know that was different, they did what they had to do…”

Priss crossed her arms. “Fuck off. You both think the cops are just people trying to do good? A bunch of heroes who just need bigger guns? Then you need to spend some time outside of Shinjuku and actually live in this fucking city.”

Nene ground her teeth. “You take that back.”

“I ain’t takin’ shit back, Little Miss Cyberpunk. You guys are delusional.”

“I  _ said _ , you take that back.” She put her hot chocolate down and stood up, hands balled into fists.

“Or what? You wanna fight? You know I will fucking wreck your little girl’s ass, so what’s your plan? You gonna try to hack your way out of this one?”

Nene almost moved, but stopped herself. “What if I was to do that? Like if, say, I was to add a couple dozen parking tickets to your record, fifty thousand yen each? What would you do then?”

“You little-” Priss moved, practically kicking off of the couch, but found herself held back by Linna, arms expertly locked behind her back. Nene took a step forward, and found Sylia holding her arms too.

“Don’t,” Linna said. “We’re a team, remember?”

“Indeed,” Sylia said dispassionately. “For all your bickering, I would have thought you two had just joined the team. It was remarkably immature of you to say such things about the police, Priss, no matter how true they may be to you, and it was almost as immature, Nene, for you to rise to the occasion. I expect better of you both.”

An instant passed, slow as the sea eating the shoreline. Priss wiggled a bit, but Linna’s grip held steady. Nene stuck out her tongue at Priss, and felt her arms get slightly bent out of place, at the threshold between mild discomfort and excruciating pain. She drew her tongue back, and Sylia’s grip slackened.

Why, Priss thought, should she apologize to Nene? She’d never been one to bury conflict for the sake of friendship. She wasn’t even really friends with Nene. She respected the work she did as a Saber, but that was about it. It was gangster logic: let this go and it’d just come up at a later date. Better for Nene to get a history lesson now than on the battlefield.

But Linna wasn’t moving, and there was that impassive look on Sylia’s face, the one that could be taken to mean just about anything she wanted. It was funny, because on some level she felt as though she understood her stoic leader’s feelings best. They had both killed before, understood how easy it was to start and to never stop, to never look back. What did Linna and Nene know about what was necessary? She didn’t like Sylia’s plan, or the way it seemed to brush too close with that skull-faced shadow. But she understood it, at least. It was the kind of plan she would have come up with before coming face-to-faceplate with that motherfucker.

But then she thought of how Nene was openly advocating stealing from a man who’d saved her life. That took balls, more balls than she’d thought Nene could ever possibly have. Moreover, she believed in the police even when they’d failed her. She believed in an ideal in the face of reality. That took balls, in its own way. Little Nene Romanova, the Knight with no Saber, was shaping up to be kind of a badass in Priss’s head.

Sylia spoke. “I know you are afraid of what this mission means for our future. It is not easy for me, either.” She sighed. “I still think about the way Mason’s throat opened up, how much blood there was behind that little resistance, the way his eyes bulged out in shock. But all the same, I am willing to do this, because I know that something must be done, or we will have failed this city. I expect the same from all of you. To fight for this city’s sake even when you are afraid, to kill even when it goes against what you believe, to sacrifice oneself on the altar of the greater good - that is what it means to be a Knight Saber. And you all know this.”

She did know that. She loved Megatokyo as much as she hated it, but to fail it - to fail Sho’s mother and Sylvie and Irene and Cynthia and Pops and Sho - who had nothing to do with any of this - she couldn’t do that. Sylia was right. She had no choice.

Linna’s grip loosened enough for Priss to wiggle her arms out. “I’m in,” she said. “Yeah, Nemesis is a crazy, but like I said, you have to be a little crazy for this kind of job. I just hope you know what you’re doing, Sylia.”

“I do. Linna, Nene, what I ask of you is difficult, but it is not insurmountable. We have new hardsuits and motoslaves, we will have plenty of mechanical targets if my intel is correct, so there is a good chance very little blood will be on your hands directly, but it will be there nonetheless. But inaction will lead to innocent blood being shed, and you will be responsible for that, in your own way, and I know that is what neither of you want.”

Linna sighed behind Priss. “I can do it,” she sighed. “I can do it once, but never again. We’re superheroes, not assassins.”

Nene wiggled a little in Sylia’s grip; then she let go, and the redhead bounced back over to her hot chocolate, taking a long swing of it. Finally, a little brown mustache on her upper lip, she spoke, turning to Sylia:

“Okay, but if we can talk Nemesis into just letting Sato get arrested, we go for it. We don’t kill if we don’t have to.”

Sylia smiled. “Alright. I’ll see what I can do. But I won’t make any promises.”

Then the smile was gone, and she was all business again. “We don’t have much time. Nene, Linna, get back to work as soon as you can. I’ll meet with Fargo and Mallory, see what they’ve turned up, and once you all are ready we’ll go over the new hardsuits and motoslaves. Priss, you stay with me. I want to have a talk with you.”

Nene and Linna looked at her funny as she slumped back down in her seat, but left anyway. When they were gone, she spoke.

“Okay. What’s all this about?”

“Honestly?” Sylia said, and that smile was back. “Everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's the last of my backlog of content from my four-month off season. I think it's okay, it wasn't as much fun to write as an action scene, but it sets in motion a lot of moving parts for the continuation of the plot. Rest assured, things are going to get very interesting from here on out. 
> 
> In the meantime, while you wait for the next chapter in this little adventure, why not check out more of Reed's work at his archived Geocities site? Of particular note is what was supposed to be the third entry in Bubblegum Crucible, a crossover with Highlander that has an extremely intricate firefight in the Ladys633, and Bubblegum Avatar, a self-insert where Mr. Reed becomes the fifth Saber - without upstaging every other character in the story. It is arguably one of the best BGC self-inserts out there, and there are a LOT of those.


End file.
